


Seek Out the Hidden Places

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Series: Just Stay Alive [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Dating, M/M, Polyamory, secondary trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-06
Updated: 2014-08-06
Packaged: 2018-02-11 23:47:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2087607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today, on this morning, while Sam stood here in his PJs, his boyfriend Captain America was in his kitchen eating yogurt, and Sam had to figure out how to tell him that he'd kind of arguably cheated on him with the Winter Soldier who was also, incidentally, Bucky Barnes, the other half of the thus-far-tragic love story of Steve Rogers' epic life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seek Out the Hidden Places

**Author's Note:**

> Many many thanks to Commodorified for being the first to tell me I had to rewrite something, Rubynye for unflagging enthusiasm through this whole process, sophia_sol for getting me to do yet more rewrites, templemarker for coming in to beta at the end of this whole mess, and Iulia for putting up with me as always. ♥

Sam knew he was awake when he realized he was feeling an awkward mix of excitement and dread. He stayed still with his face in his pillow while he chased that feeling down. He'd learned in the last few years that it never worked out well when he went around feeling something without knowing why.

He remembered first that he had been waking up like this more often than not since the day he helped Captain America take down SHIELD. He turned his head at that thought and realized that Steve wasn't in his bed anymore. That was when he remembered that on this particular morning, he felt like this because Bucky had come by last night. 

Sam heard the fridge door close and winced, thinking about what had been happening up against that door five hours ago. He couldn't put this off. He had to talk to Steve _now_ , despite the fact that he'd had about two hours of sleep and zero brilliant ideas about how to tell Steve what had happened.

Sam walked out into the kitchen to find Steve standing in front of the fridge eating blueberry yogurt.

Even with everything else, Sam just had to stop for a second and stare. This was his life right now. Today, on this morning, while Sam stood here in his PJs, his boyfriend Captain America was in his kitchen eating yogurt, and Sam had to figure out how to tell him that he'd kind of arguably cheated on him with the Winter Soldier who was also, incidentally, Bucky Barnes, the other half of the thus-far-tragic love story of Steve Rogers' epic life. 

Sam shook his head at himself. Shakespeare maybe would have known how to say this, but Sam had nothing.

Steve turned slightly, still not looking at Sam. He was, in fact, looking at the fridge. 

Sam tallied the points of interest in the room. Bucky's earpiece and the orange were gone from the counter. The bag was gone from its place by the front door, which Steve would have seen already because Steve was in his running gear and looking slightly tousled in the way he did after a run. The glass Sam had drunk from last night was sitting out on the counter, where Bucky must have set it down after he caught it. But Steve wasn't looking at any of that; he was looking at the fridge door.

Steve turned, licked his spoon clean, and said, apparently calmly, "So Bucky was here last night."

His gaze flicked down Sam's body, and Sam realized that the very most damning change in the room was him: he was wearing all different clothes than he'd gone to bed in.

"Yeah, he was," Sam said, completely wrong-footed. Steve seemed to be ready to run this conversation, so, fine. He'd follow Steve's lead. That usually worked out well, or at least got them to where they were going, give or take a few explosions.

Steve nodded and turned to look at the fridge again; this time he raised his hand and touched it. Sam moved in close enough to see that Steve was tracing a shallow curve at shoulder height--a barely-visible line of dried sweat.

"You changed before you came back to bed," Steve went on. His voice was still perfectly modulated, shoulders still loose. "And you didn't wake me up."

Sam nodded, waiting for Steve to actually ask him a question.

"He held you there for a while," Steve said. He flattened his hand against the fridge. "And you sweated right through your shirt. But you didn't make a sound to wake me, even after he was gone."

"He covered my mouth at first," Sam offered.

That made Steve turn and look at him. He had that same desperate hunger to know in his eyes that he'd gotten when he made Sam repeat back the phrases _thanks_ and _I liked it_ and _I'll keep watch_ a couple dozen times in the space of a week. It hit Sam all over again, how much--how desperately--Steve loved Bucky. 

They hadn't been on the hunt together a week before it had been obvious to Sam how gone Steve was on this guy. He could play cool, collected Captain America laying out tactical objectives and search strategies, but the second Steve started talking about the Bucky he used to know, it just poured out of him. The topic of Bucky lit Steve up like nothing else, and Sam finally had an answer to that question he'd asked Steve back at the beginning of all of this: Bucky made Steve happy. Ever since Bucky had said hello via high-powered rifle Steve had been cultivating a crush on the new version, grabbing hold of every little scrap he gave them and holding on for dear life.

That had made it kind of a stupid move for Sam to fall in love with Steve while watching him be head over heels for Bucky, but nothing about going on this mission with Steve was making the list of Sam's smartest choices. He had his eyes open--he got that he was along for the ride until Steve got Bucky back--and he wasn't lying to himself too much about what that was going to mean down the road. He still wouldn't trade this for anything; he knew that Steve loved him, too, on kind of a normal, survivable human scale that couldn't hold a candle to his thing with Bucky. It was nobody's fault--well, it was Hydra's fault, but not Steve's, or Bucky's. It was just colossally bad timing. Sam couldn't begrudge Steve any of this, and he wasn't going to withhold the pieces of Bucky that he could give Steve now.

"He didn't hurt me," Sam said, because it was obvious that that was what Steve was worried about. "He might not have laid a hand on me at all, but he startled me when I was getting a drink of water. I threw that at him." 

Sam nodded toward the glass, sitting out on the counter so pointedly that it might as well have a tag reading _Exhibit A_. 

"He caught it and grabbed me and pushed me up against the fridge, pinned me so I couldn't fight. I didn't even get a real look at him until then, which is when he told me who he was and asked me not to wake you up."

Steve's face went very still at that, but Sam knew better than to try to cushion it or hide it from him. It wasn't like they didn't both know that while Bucky would acknowledge Steve's orders, the only totally voluntary words he'd said so far had been to Sam while Steve was asleep. If Bucky wanted to talk to Steve all he had to do was come within a mile and open his mouth. So far he hadn't.

Belatedly Sam looked around for his phone, but he'd left it by the bed. Steve's was on the island, though. Sam picked it up to check the always-visible app that showed whether Bucky's earpiece was within transmission range. It wasn't, which Sam knew Steve would have checked before he said a word, but--

 _Trust but verify_. Sam set the phone down where they could both see it if the icon blinked from red to green.

"He held you up against the fridge and _asked_ you not to wake me up," Steve said, his gaze fixed on the phone. "See, this is what I've been thinking about for the last hour. I feel like I've given you the idea that Bucky comes first with me, and maybe you've been thinking that that means that whatever Bucky wants is all right with me. That I wouldn't take your part against him."

Sam winced. It wasn't like he hadn't thought Steve would help him if Bucky got violent, but he also knew perfectly well that Bucky _did_ come first with Steve, no matter how much Steve tried to be a good boyfriend and partner to Sam.

Steve hadn't been looking at him, but his expression tightened like he'd seen that. He turned and touched the fridge door again, delicately, like he could hurt it, and Sam finally put together what Steve was dancing around.

"Steve, wait," Sam said, putting enough force into his voice to get Steve to actually look at him instead of just tallying up visible evidence. "Have you been thinking that Bucky attacked me? Some kind of--sexual assault?"

Steve kept his attention focused on Sam, obviously not letting himself flinch. "I'm sorry if I'm out of line," Steve said stiffly. "It just seemed like--"

"Okay," Sam said. "You're not out of line. You're not totally off base. But I meant it when I said he didn't hurt me. It wasn't like that."

Steve frowned and dropped his gaze again. "But there was an it, then."

"Yeah," Sam said. There was no point cushioning this, either. He might as well just say it in the fewest words possible and get on with explaining himself once Steve had the facts. Bucky had even wanted him to tell, insisted on it. _You'll tell him?_

And then, just as insistently, _You'll stay with him._ But that wasn't even a question; Sam would stay as long as Steve needed him.

"I stood right there with Bucky last night and I kissed him," Sam said slowly, pointing. "I told him it was okay for him to kiss me, and I kept kissing him and holding on to him until he got off on rubbing up against me."

Steve's frown deepened, still looking more like concentration than anger. "While he held you up against the fridge. It's not that I don't believe you, Sam, I just--it doesn't sound like he was giving you a lot of choice."

For some reason, Sam hadn't considered the possibility that telling Steve he'd made out with Bucky was going to lead directly to him having to _defend Bucky's honor_ to Steve.

"You want me to tell you he was a gentleman?" Sam asked, and Steve's mouth went tight the way it did when he'd run out of patience for being teased about belonging to another century. 

"Steve, he was. He asked permission. The first second I tried to pull away from him he backed off and looked ready to run. Bucky's stronger than I am in exactly the same way _you're_ stronger than I am, so I need you to believe me when I say that _Bucky didn't force me to do anything_."

Steve's shoulders dropped--it looked more like surrender than relief--and he went over to the sink to rinse off his spoon and the yogurt cup. Sam watched while he put the spoon in the dishwasher and the cup in the recycling bin and then came over to lean against the counter next to Sam, close enough for Sam to feel his body heat but not quite touching.

"I do believe you," Steve said quietly. "It's not that I don't. I just--I kept thinking that I've been making this choice to trust Bucky, to keep inviting him in, when I don't have a right to make that choice for you. I can put myself in his way, but not you."

Sam tried to control his expression for a second, and then he shook his head and gave up. When Steve looked over, Sam let him see exactly how unimpressed he was with that whole line of reasoning. Steve winced and looked down.

"You're right," Sam said. "You don't get to make that choice for me. But if you haven't noticed that _I've_ been making that choice for me, I don't know where you've been for the last month."

Steve looked away, his tensed shoulder coming up like a wall between them, and Sam gentled his voice a little. "That first time, when we didn't know who it was in the woods with the rifle, but you thought it was Bucky--when I stepped out and let myself be silhouetted, I was trusting you. But after that, when I trusted Bucky to have my back going up against Hydra, I was trusting him. And it's not just your back he's had. He's had mine, too. He's _earned_ my trust, Steve. He deserves it."

Steve nodded, frowning but at least listening, Sam thought.

"Look, man. Why the hell did you ask me to come with you on this?"

Steve looked up, and Sam watched a variety of possible responses flicker behind his eyes before Steve said, "Because you're my friend, and I trusted you to understand about Bucky. You--I realize this is beyond what you do at the VA, but you've helped soldiers who've been through hell. I thought Bucky needed someone like that on his side even more than I did."

Sam hesitated, thrown, and he asked cautiously, "Were you expecting me to be Bucky's therapist?"

Steve's mouth turned up in a crooked smile as he ducked his head. "I don't know, are you mine?"

Sam raised his eyebrows. They'd had this conversation, and he didn't really want to have it again now.

Steve glanced up and said hastily, "No, you're not. I know that. But you still--you know how to help when I have nightmares or when I get--" 

Steve waved a hand, because he still hadn't gotten quite to the point of accepting the vocabulary of trauma and wouldn't say that he got triggered when he did. Sam mostly let it slide because it usually had to do with Bucky and secondary trauma wasn't the easiest concept for anybody to make their peace with. Also because he wasn't Steve's therapist.

"I mean, I," Steve hesitated again, frowning. "This isn't--maybe, if there were anybody left to give me orders I was willing to accept, maybe apprehending the Winter Soldier would be legitimately Captain America's professional responsibility. But finding Bucky is personal, making sure he comes in safe and doesn't have everything Hydra used him for fall on his head--that's personal for me. What I'm doing here, what I asked for your help with, I'm doing for absolutely personal reasons." 

That, Sam was pretty clear on, though he and Steve had never discussed it in quite such bald terms. They had no authority to be doing what they were doing, going after Hydra. They were unsupported vigilantes here, and Sam just had to hope that standing next to Steve would be some kind of help to him if they ever screwed up and got nailed to the wall over it. The one thing he knew for sure was that Steve would never let him take the fall alone.

He didn't know how persuasive his mom was going to find that argument if Sam ended up in prison over this, but Sam wasn't letting Steve go it alone either, so there was no use worrying about it.

"It was the same the first time I rescued Bucky from Hydra," Steve went on. "I went completely AWOL, defied orders, misused resources, suborned Peggy--Colonel Phillips showed me a list afterward of everything they could have charged me with. It was a lot. I did that for Bucky, but I couldn't have done it without--" Steve waved a hand at his body. "Everything I am. So I guess all I'm saying is that--I asked for your help because you're my friend, and you've helped me a lot as my friend. I hoped you were bringing your entire skill set with you when you came."

Sam sighed, allowing the point. Steve's life didn't really make for the kind of firm line between the personal and the professional that he'd been taught to draw working at the VA. 

But they'd been talking about Bucky and last night. 

"I did," Sam said. "So trust me when I say that I know something about this. I have sat alone in a room with guys who could have killed me every bit as much as Bucky could if they were triggered--not as fast, maybe, but they could have gotten the job done if they thought they had to. I know about risk assessment, and I know Bucky--not as long as you have, but right now I probably know him just about as well."

Steve grimaced at that but didn't argue.

Sam pressed his point. "I know what his breathing sounds like when he's starting to panic because you've been talking about the old days for a few minutes and he's about to go out of range so he can't hear it anymore. I know how he works when he's focused on a fire mission. I know everything that's in those files. I had a pretty good idea of what I was nose-to-nose with last night, and I made my own choice not to call in backup. What happened last night between me and Bucky--you can feel jealous about it or any other kind of way it might make you feel, but it's between me and Bucky, and you're not responsible for it."

That made Steve look up, with a small but honest smile. "I've always been responsible for Bucky, just like he was for me. We took each other on when I was five years old, and we never gave up." 

Steve's smile faded, his gaze going back to the fridge before returning to Sam. "If he hurt you, I would stop him. If he were hurting other people, I would stop him, no matter what it took. I couldn't let him do that, however much I had to hurt him to stop him. I could believe he was capable of it and know he had to be stopped, but it wouldn't change what he is to me."

Steve stopped there. 

Sam nudged him with a shoulder and prompted, "What is he?"

"My Bucky, right or wrong." Steve's mouth crimped into a tense little smile. 

That... sounded about right, honestly. Steve was probably a lot closer to giving up on the country than he was to giving up on Bucky. 

"You know how the rest of that saying goes?" Steve went on. " _If right to be kept right, if wrong to be set right._ And that's not just because of how he is now. I spent a lot of time trying to set Buck right the first twenty-two years we knew each other. He was always a little more flexible about right and wrong than I was."

If Sam were at work he'd maybe try to point out that no human being could take that kind of responsibility for another--not parent for child, not CO for soldier, and certainly not Steve for Bucky. No matter how much Steve loved Bucky, their actual connection was pretty tenuous now. 

But they'd already established that Sam wasn't Steve's therapist, thank Christ. He also hadn't had any coffee and not nearly enough sleep, and he knew Steve well enough to know that this wasn't a point he was open to debating. 

"Sure," Sam said. "But you also have to let me decide whether he's done something to me that I need your help to stop."

Steve nodded. "I'm sorry," he said. It reminded Sam dizzyingly of the way Bucky had apologized for things last night. 

"I know it defeats the purpose of my not being there if I ask you to tell me everything that happened--" and Sam could hear in the carefulness of his words how much it was killing him not to ask Sam to do a second-by-second dramatic reenactment. "Is there anything you can tell me about it? About him?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "He actually--he wanted me to tell you, at least about the kissing. I don't think he really minds you knowing, he just wasn't ready to see you."

Steve looked away, his mouth wobbling like he was trying to make himself smile and couldn't do it. 

Sam tried to pull together some kind of factual, objective report. There were things Steve _ought_ to know, strictly as a matter of their joint mission to bring Bucky home. 

"He looked okay, smelled okay. He's keeping clean, and he didn't look like he was about to drop from sleep deprivation. Clear-eyed. Fully conscious, oriented, never went away on me while we were talking. He's eating, too. He mentioned the pie you left for him, and he liked the orange."

Steve covered his face with his hand, and Sam felt a little tension seep out of his shoulder. 

"He said he hasn't killed anyone outside our ops, even when I framed it sympathetically," Sam went on, and Steve's hand came back down, his eyes locking intently on Sam. 

"You would have woken me up for that," Steve said, tightly controlled.

"I would," Sam agreed, because they'd both agreed from the start that if Bucky was on some kind of rampage they would have to do whatever it took to stop him. "But let me quote him, because this is important. He said, _I know Bucky wouldn't hurt civilians._ "

Steve's face crumpled into baffled anxiety. "He--he doesn't know that he's Bucky? But then--"

"He wouldn't let me call him Barnes," Sam remembered. "He insisted on Bucky. So he does know he's Bucky, or--hell, man, I don't know, the inside of his head is way, way above my pay grade whether I'm on the clock or not. It does mean that he has some kind of standard of behavior that he's trying to stick to, and it's something he remembers about being Bucky."

"So that's... good," Steve decided, though he looked like the word tasted sour.

"Yeah," Sam agreed, to word and expression both. "And then in the next breath he quoted Ronald Reagan at me in a Russian accent, which I'm guessing means he also remembers stuff his KGB handlers were saying to him in the eighties." 

"Reagan?" Steve asked, forehead wrinkling. "What...."

" _Trust but verify_ , it was a catchphrase of his about the Soviets," Sam waved one hand. "But it was pretty obvious Bucky was repeating it the way someone else said it, because he had an accent for a second there. So the Soldier's in there, too."

"Trust but verify," Steve repeated. "Well, we've got that covered."

Sam nodded.

"Did you..." Sam waited Steve out, and wasn't surprised when the rest of that question turned out to be, "Did you ask him about Sperryville? About why he took off?"

"Yeah. I couldn't get a clear answer out of him about what upset him, but you were right, he said it wasn't the idea of us being an item that bothered him. He said the way your breathing sounded reminded him of you having an asthma attack and he wanted to check on you, that's why he came up on our twenty without being told to."

Steve let out a rough breath, but pressed his fingers to his mouth and didn't say anything else.

"That was when," Sam said carefully. "He had me backed up against the fridge like--"

Even if Steve was managing not to ask for it, a little bit of dramatic reenactment probably wouldn't hurt. Sam stepped around Steve, and Steve allowed himself to be manhandled until Sam had him pressed up against the counter--not really the same, with nothing at Steve's back, but it was the right amount of body contact.

"We'd been like that since he first came at me," Sam said, looking Steve steadily in the eye, feeling Steve's breathing against his chest the same way he'd felt Bucky's the night before, his stomach and thighs pressed flush to Steve's. Steve was running pretty hot right now. 

"He was leaning into me the whole time we were talking. I don't think he was even aware of it, but he was staying as close as he could, like he was cold."

"Like you were the first person who'd touched him without hurting him since 1944," Steve corrected, holding his gaze unflinchingly, and Sam knew that he'd bet right. Steve sincerely did not begrudge the comfort Sam had given Bucky the night before.

Sam tilted his head. "Or like that, yeah. So it wasn't a total surprise when he moved from talking about kissing to asking if he could, and I thought--we talked about encouraging him if he initiated contact, right?"

Steve's mouth curved up slightly at Sam's teasing inflection, and Sam couldn't resist leaning in the few inches it took to be kissing that smile. Steve's hands came up instantly, holding on to him while Steve kissed him back, hungry for it. Steve had spent a long time being cold and untouched himself, and Sam was here for him, first and always.

Steve looked a little dazed--and was starting to get hard, pressed up against Sam--when he lifted his head. It was a good look on him. "Sorry. You were saying."

Sam stared at Steve's reddened mouth for a few seconds--he wanted to touch, and then remembered Bucky's fingers on his own lips--before he pulled it together.

"Yeah. Bucky kissed me, and when I pulled back a little to catch a breath, he just--"

Sam demonstrated, taking a sharp step away. Steve raised a hand as if to catch Sam and pull him back, and quickly dropped it.

"He looked like he was going to run, and that didn't seem like a good note to end on. I didn't want him to take off again. So I doubled down, told him to come back and kiss me some more."

Steve nodded, expression going back to careful neutrality.

"He didn't go for it right away," Sam went on, watching Steve for any hint of a reaction. "He didn't want to come between us. He wanted to be sure you and me would still be together afterward if he kissed me."

Steve didn't flinch, exactly. Sam just got a sense from him like he'd become his shield, absorbing a blow and giving back nothing. He just stood there; Sam watched his jaw work from time to time, his eyes averted, his whole body tensing and relaxing and tensing up again as he struggled with whatever was going on in his head.

When three solid minutes had gone by--Sam timed it by the clock on the microwave--Sam gave in and got a little tiny bit professional. He said gently, "You don't have to say it exactly right on the first try, man. Just tell me what you're thinking and we'll figure it out from there. We're on the same side, okay?"

Steve gave him a look like he knew he was being handled--he usually did, unless he was in really bad shape--but he nodded slightly and took a deep breath before speaking. "I just keep thinking--it should've been me. Why wasn't it me? Why wouldn't he--but that's the same as him talking to you first, it's not any different."

Sam waited, but Steve didn't follow that up with anything. This conversation had been a long time coming, and it was no surprise that sex would be Steve's breaking point. "Okay, you're going to have to tell me if that's actually how you feel, or if you're just being noble right now."

Steve snorted. "Nothing noble about it. You said before I was allowed to be jealous, didn't you? I'm jealous as hell, Sam, but I don't own Bucky, and I don't own you. I wouldn't ask you to do a thing differently next time, so if I feel sore about it it's nobody's concern but mine. I'm glad you were there for him, I'm glad he trusted you that much."

Every so often Steve said something like that that made Sam's chest hurt with how _good_ he was. This one was possibly the worst, and after a few seconds' struggle Sam stepped in close to him again, making himself available for whatever Steve might need right now. 

Steve grabbed him in a hard, tight hug, burying his face against Sam's shoulder, and Sam closed his arms around Steve. He remembered Bucky's weight resting against him, Bucky hiding his face the same way. Sam turned his head and kissed Steve's temple through the overwhelming feeling of déjà vu, rubbing one hand slowly against Steve's back. 

"I'm not going anywhere," Sam said softly, because that was an easy promise to make. He wouldn't, not until Steve went first, taking Bucky off to New York or wherever they were going to wind up. All Sam would do was stay behind, and that day was a long way off yet. 

Steve's arms tightened around him for a second before Steve let go and pushed back. Sam moved far enough to let him, dropping his hands back to his sides.

Steve ran his hand over his face unselfconsciously and said, "So he--you kissed, Bucky got off, and that was it?"

Sam nodded. "I got him to take the bag with him, and he said thanks before he left, and then he was gone."

"Thanks," Steve said, parroting Bucky or thanking Sam for the report or both. He ran a hand through his hair, and added in a lighter tone, "You bring out Bucky's polite side, apparently."

"That was a surprise. I didn't think he had much of one, judging from the stories you tell."

"Well," Steve said, waving a hand. "Not with _me_. He never minded being a gentleman with other people--girls, especially. He figured out somewhere along the line that if you start out apologizing to a girl she'll almost always talk to you. He'd just brush past someone and then turn and apologize like he'd knocked her down, he could make up a million things to say sorry--"

It finally clicked, and Sam burst out in a laugh.

Steve looked at him, baffled, as Sam covered his face with one hand. 

"He apologized to me _twice_ ," Sam managed. "It was the first thing he said. Jesus Christ, it was a _line_."

Steve laughed too, a startled bark of sound. "Why?"

Sam raised his eyebrows, even though he knew what Steve meant, and Steve rolled his eyes, refusing to fall for it. "I know why he would make a pass, I obviously can't fault his taste. What did he apologize for?"

Sam shook his head, lowered his hand and tilted his head back. Christ, Bucky. "For scaring me, first, and then for wrecking my wings back at the helicarrier."

That sobered Steve right up, and Sam couldn't disagree. Bucky's dating strategies getting mixed up with the Winter Soldier's missions was... not an unambiguous good sign.

"So, Sam Wilson." Steve tapped Sam's shoulder, and his voice was about halfway to full-on Captain America. "You're now the world's greatest living expert on James Barnes, aka--" Steve made a sweeping gesture that took in all the codenames and aliases they'd run across for Bucky, most of which Steve refused to repeat, like saying them would give them power. "The Winter Soldier. How would you assess his current threat level?"

Sam let out a long sigh. "I still think the best evidence we've got is that he aimed to miss when he had a rifle on you that first time; that seems like a strong indication that he's broken Hydra's conditioning. You can't put him in a situation where he's any more primed to follow through and kill you, and he didn't. On top of that he's worked with us ever since, against them. Last night he came inside, that's a significant step. He's putting himself on our side. He says he's being careful not to hurt people, which I believe, but he's a long way from truly stable. I can't promise you he's safe--I wouldn't want to see what happened if he got triggered around civilians--but I'd say he's a better bet than he was twenty-four hours ago."

Steve nodded. "I think we have to go to New York and tell some people about him."

 _Some people_ , Sam figured, meant the Avengers. Tony Stark, for sure--they'd already been in touch with him about the comms, and Steve had apparently convinced him to make Sam new wings. They'd been in touch with Natasha, too, so Steve would probably want to brief her, and anyone else he could round up.

Sam couldn't argue with that. They'd been prepared to call in the other Avengers if Bucky needed to be stopped, but until they had a lead on him Steve hadn't wanted to pull them away from dealing with other problems. Natasha and Tony had helped out already, but for the last month Steve had insisted on letting them believe that Bucky was still completely in the wind, with Steve and Sam two steps behind instead of half a step ahead. Sam had agreed; they hadn't known much of anything about Bucky's state of mind or odds of coming in for real until now. Last night changed things, though, and it was time to stop hiding Bucky from Steve's team.

Steve opened his mouth to say more, and there was a little chirp from the phone on the island. They both turned to look down at it, even though that noise only meant one thing: Bucky's icon had turned green. He could hear them now.

Sam touched the bit of plastic tucked into his own ear and glanced over at Steve, whose expression was unreadable as he looked down at the phone.

"Hey, Bucky, we were just talking about you," Steve said, and Sam closed his eyes. He and Steve had talked about how to--and how not to--try something like this, but it was Steve's call to make. Sam was honestly surprised Steve had lasted this long without making a direct overture.

Bucky didn't make an audible sound. There was, as ever, a chance that Bucky was carrying the earpiece around but not actually listening.

"I know I haven't said much," Steve went on. "It seemed like you weren't ready to talk to me. You don't have to now. I just want you to know that Sam told me about you dropping by last night, and it's not a problem. Any time you want to talk to Sam or come in to spend some time with him, you can text him or just--come to the door. I'll clear out if you want to be alone with him."

There was still nothing from Bucky, no matter how hard Sam tried to catch the sound of his breathing. He had to be pretty agitated before it came through, even though the audio pickup on Bucky's earpiece was tuned to a higher sensitivity than Sam's or Steve's.

"I just wanted you to know that," Steve finished awkwardly, and there was another silence while Steve visibly remembered not to press for an answer.

Then Bucky said, "Roger, Rogers."

Steve's face drained so white he looked green, and he clawed his earpiece out and turned away, all but flinging himself into the bathroom. Sam hung back. He heard the water switch on and nothing else.

"Steve's taking a shower," Sam said. He was weirdly conscious of being, in a way, alone with Bucky. "Just me on the line now."

There was another silence. Sam rubbed his forehead and set about making some extremely overdue coffee. He was halfway through the process when Bucky said in a smaller voice, "Did I say that wrong?"

"No," Sam said firmly, and glanced toward the closed bathroom door. "I'm guessing you said it exactly right."

* * *

Steve took off a couple of hours later for a visit with Peggy--late morning was usually a pretty good time, and he'd been feeling bad about not visiting while they were on the road. Sam spent some time doing stuff around the house. He studiously did not contemplate exactly how many epic century-spanning loves of his life Steve was still carrying torches for, but that kind of focus got exhausting after a while. He gave up when the hour started creeping toward noon and headed in to work.

It wasn't his workplace right now, but he was only on a leave of absence; he still had his badge and keycard, and he hadn't been gone long enough to fall out of the rhythm of the place. Most importantly, he still knew his officemate's schedule about as well as he knew his own.

He knew, for instance, that Mel would have brought leftovers for lunch today, and would be coming out of her eleven o'clock group feeling decidedly unenthusiastic about last night's stir fry. Sam hit the little soup place where they took turns picking up lunch to bolt down at their desks while doing paperwork. He picked up his own usual and hers, including the cookie bar she wouldn't always indulge in, and timed his arrival outside the group session room perfectly. The last of Mel's group members headed past him as he walked up, and Mel was just putting the lid on her box of brochures and flyers. 

She smiled at the sight of him, raised her eyebrows at the sight of lunch, and said, "Well, I'm not passing this up. Come on."

Sam walked with Mel, automatically matching his pace to her. She'd left the Air Force around the same time he had, after losing a piece of her foot to an IED, although most days that made less difference to her stride than the fact that she barely came up to Sam's shoulder. He asked after Callie and Kevin, and Mel shot him an _I know exactly what you're doing_ look before she updated him on her wife's adventures as a middle school teacher and their three-year-old's ongoing obsession with Captain America. That had been vaguely cute and funny two months ago, but now it was pretty bizarre. Kevin wasn't old enough to care about autographs, but Sam wondered if he'd be able to get Steve to come to the kid's fourth birthday party. That was three or four months away still, and Sam wasn't confident predicting his or Steve's future that far out.

Mel unlocked the office door, balancing her bankers box on her hip while she did; Sam knew better than to offer to do it for her. He followed her in, setting the bag of food down on her desk.

His own desk hadn't been colonized in his absence so far--it was still weirdly neat and empty, the way he'd left it after sorting out and passing off his entire caseload to his co-workers. Mel hadn't gotten any of his--she worked with chronically ill vets, not the mostly-functional PTSD crowd Sam dealt with--which was a large part of the reason she was still speaking to him, as well as still having _time_ to speak to him. 

He'd told his boss that he'd been caught up in the middle of what went down that day and needed some time off; no one had been happy to lose him, but they'd understood. Sam hadn't told anyone but Mel exactly what he was doing with his leave time. She wasn't his therapist either, but they'd been venting to each other about things they couldn't tell anyone else for a while now, and they had a rhythm.

Mel opened up the bags and started setting out food. Sam grabbed a couple of bottles of water from the mini-fridge--he smiled briefly at the Tupperware container of stir-fry--and pulled up his own desk chair.

"So," Mel said. "This looks very much like you want to apologize to me in advance for whatever you need to tell me about."

"I need some less perceptive friends," Sam said, unwrapping his sandwich.

"Or you need to stop doing things you don't want your friends to figure out just by looking at you," Mel countered. She gave him another long, thoughtful look. She didn't bust out any more observations about what he was about to say, though, and Sam didn't think she was going to guess Bucky.

"So that guy Steve's crazy about," Sam said, unutterably glad that he'd been calling her from the road from time to time to check in with the real world. He hadn't told her everything about Bucky--not what Hydra had used him for while they had him, for instance--but she had the gist as far as relationships went. "He showed up at my place last night."

"Showed up, like," Mel said, pausing with the plastic spoon halfway to her mouth. "I know this isn't the lunch of _I just got dumped by Captain America_ , Sam."

"No," Sam said. "That's gonna involve alcohol. This is the lunch of _I kinda had sex with Captain America's long-lost boyfriend_."

"Wow," Mel said. "I don't even know where to--no, I do know. Are you in high school? You _kinda_ had sex with this guy?"

"We made out until he came in his pants, so, yeah, pretty high school," Sam allowed. When you took out the _unstoppable assassin_ part it actually sounded like a pleasantly stupid thing to have done.

"And Steve was where while this was happening?" Mel said, watching him with the blend of fascination and open judgment that made her exactly the right person to be telling this.

"Sleeping," Sam said. "Bucky showed up in the middle of the night and surprised me in the kitchen. This all happened at three in the morning. He didn't want to see Steve. He's still only talking to me, apparently."

Mel took another bite of soup, looked contemplatively over the food again, and said, "Okay, I know you're not lying to Steve about this, and this is _still_ not the lunch of _I just got dumped by Captain America_ , so...."

"He minds that Bucky had sex with me instead of him," Sam said with a shrug. "He didn't really bat an eye at me having sex with Bucky once he knew Bucky didn't push me into it. After we talked things over Steve told Bucky he didn't mind Bucky coming by again to see me."

"Well, how generous of Steve," Mel said dryly, and Sam waved that away--it was Steve who Bucky hadn't wanted to hurt, it made sense for them. "What'd _you_ tell Bucky?"

"I," Sam said, and stopped short. He hadn't really said anything. He hadn't figured Bucky really needed more of an invitation than he already had. Of course, the invitation he had was.... 

"I gave him a key," Sam admitted.

There was one in the bag, anyway, and Sam hadn't taken it out before Bucky left, so that probably counted as something he said to Bucky after the sex. Sam hadn't even thought about the key at the time, but he didn't regret that at all.

Mel started laughing, and then coughing, because she'd just almost choked on a mouthful of soup. Sam ducked his head and studiously devoted himself to his sandwich, glad for the thousandth time that the heat in his face didn't show. Much.

"Okay, so, it is official, I get to make lesbian U-Haul date jokes about _you_ for the rest of time," Mel said. "And also, in case I haven't mentioned it lately, your life is fucking surreal. But I'm sure you and your two time-shifted boyfriends will be very happy together."

Sam picked his head up at that, startled. "I'm not...."

Mel raised her eyebrows. "You're not what? You're not in a relationship with the guy you had sex with who your boyfriend agrees you're free to go on having sex with who _you gave a key to your house_?"

Sam frowned, trying to figure out what he was, or wasn't. His instinctive response was that he didn't think Bucky was _capable_ of a romantic relationship right now, but that wasn't his to judge if Bucky wanted to try. Sam had no real idea what Bucky was capable of other than shooting people and short periods of physical contact. He suddenly realized that he didn't know whether _Steve_ thought Sam and Bucky were in some kind of relationship now, or if that carte blanche he'd given Bucky was just supposed to be for friendly comfort sex, or--

"Sam, hey," Mel said softly, but she waited until he looked up and focused on her to lay a hand gently on his arm. 

"What I should have said," Mel went on, her hand warm on his skin, "is do you _want_ to be in a relationship with this guy? If you were making some heat-of-the-moment one-time decision last night, if the key was just about getting him to come in, that's your call. I expect you to own it, but it doesn't mean there's some kind of transitive property of being madly in love with a deeply traumatized fugitive you barely know. Just because Steve's crazy about him doesn't mean you are, or should be."

Sam shook his head. "I'm not, I just--"

It hadn't really occurred to him to ask himself whether he _wanted_ Bucky as anything other than Steve's happy ending. Even last night, up against the fridge, he'd been thinking of comforting Bucky, of giving him a human connection. Kissing hadn't seemed like a big deal, next to that.

Bucky could kiss like nobody's business, though. And if Bucky had lasted longer--if Sam hadn't been holding himself so carefully still--Bucky might not have been the only one coming in his pants. The feel of Bucky moving against him--and after, the way Bucky had gone still and quiet and let Sam hold him--

"And I just earned my apology lunch, right there, that facial expression," Mel announced, and Sam dropped his head into his hand, trying to get his face under control.

"I don't know," he said when he picked his head up. "I wanna see him again, and I'm not changing the locks. That's all I got."

"Well," Mel said, smirking a little as she unwrapped her cookie. "That's probably enough to go on. You don't want to rush into anything."

* * *

Twenty-four hours later, Sam was a couple hundred miles and an entire world away, sitting in a conference room on the 90th floor of Stark Tower. He looked out at a panorama over Midtown that made him itch to step into the sky and soar.

Steve did most of the talking, cueing Sam like an expert witness to drop in his actual observations of Bucky. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner were at the table with them, and Natasha was Skyping in from an undisclosed location. JARVIS had turned her into a fairly persuasive hologram instead of a grainy image on a laptop screen. Sam had thought a month in the field with Steve was giving him a real look at the superhero business, but it was a whole other level here.

"So here's my question," Tony said, when Steve had finished his report with a firm statement of confidence in their plan to continue letting Bucky work his own way back to them. "Do we know where Barnes was in about mid-December 1991? Just as a point of curiosity."

The mention of that year made Sam think automatically of Desert Storm deployments, but December was way off for that. Of course that wasn't what Tony meant. Tony was not-quite-smiling in a grim, tense way, turning a pen over and over in his fingers and staring steadily at Steve.

"We don't know," Steve said evenly. "We haven't found any information on his activities in the U.S. before 1996."

"He may have been lost," Natasha put in, drawing the attention of everyone at the table. "I've been doing some digging, but I can't find him in Russia, or anywhere else, between '88 and '92. If they had him then, they'd have used him, but no one used him. I'm guessing the Red Room wasn't immune to the power struggles going on around the fall of the Union. One of his handlers, even a technician, could have stashed him somewhere, meaning to use him against questionable targets or internal rivals, only to be killed themselves. I'm pretty sure it happened at least twice before then."

"They _lost_ him? For _four years_?" Steve snapped, sounding outraged.

Natasha raised an eyebrow and shrugged. "He was frozen. He didn't draw a lot of attention."

Sam glanced toward Tony, who was looking more disconcerted than he had through the whole rest of the report. 

Steve's voice was softer when he said, "A car accident wouldn't have been what they used him for, anyway. We're talking about sniper work and violent assassinations. I'm not saying he wasn't used to kill anyone's parents, but--not yours."

Tony snorted soundlessly, nodded, and then his face cleared as he looked up and said, "Okay, fine, Bucky Barnes is alive and the Winter Soldier is not my problem personally. Great. Now in the spirit of transparency and teamwork, let me tell you about everything you kicked off that _is_ causing me problems."

There wound up being a whole second day of round-robin briefings. Sam wasn't sure why he was there--this was Avengers stuff, Steve's business, but not really Steve's buddy from DC's business--but there wasn't any smooth way to bow out. At least Tony put them up at his place overnight, letting Sam sidestep the question of taking Steve to his parents' place and giving them a chance to get attached. 

The bed in the enormous apartment JARVIS directed them to was nearly as hard as a cot, and Sam slept just fine with Steve at his back.

* * *

They went running the next morning in Central Park. It was almost like being back in DC, give or take the tall buildings--possible sniper positions--overlooking them from all around the borders of the park. Sam was running laps around the reservoir while Steve did the full outer loop around the park, cutting in to the reservoir path to run up the western edge. Somehow Steve managed to time it so that they arrived at that stretch together on each loop, which was impressive enough that Sam was willing to cut him some slack for falling back on, "On your left," each time he passed. Sam was going to get the timing right to punch him when he said it one of these days.

That was mostly what Sam was thinking about--he wouldn't start eyeing the overlooking buildings until he started down the eastern side--when another runner said, "On your left," and fell into step beside him instead of breezing by.

Sam looked over at Bucky, surprised and not at all surprised at the same time. They hadn't seen his earpiece in range since they'd come to New York, but that didn't have to mean anything. Steve had taken care to brief Bucky on exactly where they were going. Sam had told him he was welcome to housesit while they were in New York--making sure to mention the key in case Bucky hadn't found it tucked into its own pocket--but neither he nor Steve had really thought Bucky was going to stay away for long.

Bucky looked good. Sam watched him as much as he could without actually turning his head and staring, running down a checklist. He was wearing clean clothes Sam hadn't seen before, soft black running pants and a long-sleeved gray t-shirt with a logoless baseball cap and sunglasses to conceal his face. His running shoes, also black, looked new too. He was matching Sam's stride and body language, doing a really successful impression of someone who had to put some effort into an eight-minute mile, though Sam didn't doubt Bucky could have kept pace with Steve all day. He was moving both arms naturally, though his gloved left hand stayed rigid in a way that read as _prosthetic_ even in Sam's peripheral vision. 

He was clean-shaven, and his cheeks were pink with exercise or razor burn or the start of a sunburn. There was a tiny trail of missed hairs down the back of his jaw, and Sam found himself glancing over at that spot again and again, taking in the evidence that Bucky was human: he could miss a spot shaving. Someone probably ought to tell him about that, Sam thought, but he wasn't going to open the conversation with criticism, even about something so minute.

He looked _good_. Sam remembered telling Mel he wanted to see Bucky again, and this felt like the granting of a wish, out here in the sunshine where he wouldn't have pictured it happening. Sam wanted to stare, but he settled for memorizing this moment when Bucky chose to come and run with him.

Bucky still hadn't said anything beyond that first few words; they were about to make the turn from the northward diagonal along the top of the Reservoir to the straight run south along Fifth Avenue. Steve would be a couple of miles away at the southern edge of the park by now; if Bucky was going to say anything, Sam thought, it would probably be right about--

He didn't actually say a word. Bucky reached over and tucked something into the palm of Sam's left hand. Sam closed his fist reflexively on it, and Bucky's fingers brushed lightly over his wrist before Bucky turned on his heel and darted straight off the trail into the trees. Sam nearly stumbled, twisting to try to watch him; he thought he saw a flash of motion that could have been Bucky going over a fence, but then he was gone. 

Sam shook his head and started running again, taking a moment to get back into the rhythm of it. When he had his stride back like nothing had happened, Sam opened his hand and looked at the folded piece of paper. There was an address written on it, somewhere down in the Garment District, although Sam was already sure that whatever that address was supposed to be wasn't what he was going to find if he went through the door. He felt his heart rate kick up higher than his pace called for, knowing that there was something there, something waiting.

Sam eyed the distance between him and the spot on the path where Steve was going to rejoin him, and set to work memorizing the address. He thought for half a second of eating the piece of paper before he tore it into tiny pieces and let it spill like confetti from between his fingers, scattering over a hundred yards of track. 

There had been no other message with it, just the address and the manner of delivery, but that was enough. Obviously Bucky wanted Sam to go there; obviously it wasn't something Bucky wanted Steve to know about, which meant he didn't want Steve involved. Sam couldn't begin to guess why, but that was true of most things about Bucky. He hadn't given a time, but that just meant that Bucky would be watching Sam or the place or both, and would find him there whenever he showed up. 

This was what he got, Sam thought, for insisting to Steve that he did and could trust Bucky. Time for the acid test: did he trust Bucky enough to meet him alone at a location that Bucky had chosen, probably more secluded than its address would suggest?

Did he dare _not_ show trust when Bucky asked him to?

He saw Steve burst out onto the track ahead of him; Steve whirled on the spot, making it look almost graceful, to see where Sam was. Sam kept his own pace, and Steve slowed down, running backwards to watch him, as Sam caught up. 

"Everything okay?" Steve asked, frowning.

"Bucky joined me for half a lap," Sam said, tilting his head toward the northern edge of the reservoir. He smiled a little, thinking of Mel and her U-Haul jokes just waiting for the next time he talked to her. "He wanted to ask me out."

* * *

They were staying in New York another day anyway, because Tony was nearly done with a new pair of wings for Sam and wanted him to stick around to test them out. By the time he'd gotten back to Stark Tower with Steve, showered and dressed, Sam knew he wasn't going to wait around to go check out Bucky's mystery destination. This wasn't the kind of thing he could just leave hanging over his own head.

Steve didn't seem surprised when Sam walked into the kitchen of their guest quarters and said, "I'm gonna head out."

He hadn't questioned Sam about the date story, even though he had to know that wasn't going to mean eating lunch at some diner or playing a few rounds of skee ball at Coney Island. At some point Sam was probably going to have to talk to Steve about what he thought was going on between Sam and Bucky, but he figured that after whatever Bucky was planning today he would have a better idea himself.

For now Steve just nodded and continued assembling a sandwich. Sam's stomach grumbled at the sight, but he'd committed to a timeline for the fictional date and he couldn't retreat from it. 

"You're not going to follow me, right," Sam said, not making it a question.

Steve shook his head without looking up. "I trust you."

There was an ungodly amount of that going around today. Sam said it back the way Steve liked to hear it, just to see his cheeks turn faintly pink. "I love you, too."

Steve smiled, and turned his head for a kiss when Sam walked into his space, getting into it a little before he turned his face away and said, "Don't keep Bucky waiting."

"Wouldn't want to do that," Sam agreed, and headed for the door.

* * *

Bucky fell into step with Sam when he turned the corner onto 37th. He was on Sam's right this time, balancing a pizza box on his left arm; he angled it toward Sam without a word, raising the lid.

"Thanks, man," Sam said, and lifted out a slice. This wasn't quite how he thought they'd be starting off whatever this was, but maybe running made Bucky hungry, too.

Bucky gave a little don't-mention-it-nod. He was still wearing the baseball cap and sunglasses, though he'd changed his running gear for a black hoodie, dark jeans, and a pair of boots, probably steel-toed and concealing however many knives Bucky liked to carry these days. Sam couldn't see the telltales of any actual firearms under his clothes, though, so Bucky probably didn't expect this to get really messy. Also, he'd brought pizza. You didn't eat pizza right before a combat mission.

Bucky finished his first slice before Sam did and licked the grease from his fingers and the side of his hand. Sam nearly tripped over a curb, watching that flash of Bucky's tongue. He made himself take another bite of pizza and put his eyes front while Bucky snagged another slice from the box.

"We going somewhere special?" Sam asked, because he was ninety percent sure now that he'd been right to come unarmed, but he'd really like to get to a hundred before they actually walked through the door.

Bucky frowned a little, chewing. He swallowed before he spoke. "Nothing exciting. Not like you and Steve." 

So this actually wasn't a raid, then. Also it was kind of depressing that Bucky thought he and Steve only went out together to raid Hydra facilities, and more depressing to think that he was mostly right. Sam should probably be putting more effort into showing Steve how twenty-first century dating worked while Steve was showing him the life of an unregulated superhero.

After a few more strides Bucky asked, "Do you like the pizza?"

"Sure," Sam said, and took another bite as he considered making the old half-joke about bad pizza and bad sex. But that might sound like a comment on the other night in his kitchen, and he didn't know--or want to know, really--what kind of standards Bucky had for bad sex. Or bad pizza, for that matter.

He finished the slice and then said, "You?"

Bucky nodded and took another bite. "It's different from how it was before. But it's good."

Sam wanted to ask him when _before_ was--did they have pizza in Brooklyn before 1942? Steve had never mentioned it, if they did, but they didn't talk much about pizza because Steve was prone to say things like, _Whatever, Domino's is fine_. Bucky seemed content to leave it at that, so Sam stuck to eating and didn't try to make conversation. 

Three blocks down there was one slice of pizza left, and Bucky paused on a corner with a trash can, tilting the box toward Sam.

Sam shook his head, and Bucky shrugged and took the last slice himself, cramming it down in six bites. Sam had seen Steve do the same when he couldn't bear to waste food, but Bucky's eyes went blank as he did it, fixed on the middle distance. For a few seconds he seemed like he was remembering something way worse than the Depression, and Sam wanted to touch him, to pull him back. He hadn't figured out how yet when Bucky swallowed, blinked and looked his way again, like nothing had happened at all.

Sam scoped out the block as inconspicuously as possible while Bucky crushed the pizza box and stuffed it into the trash can. There wasn't much foot traffic, and scaffolding ran down the fronts of the buildings on the south side of the block, making the street feel narrower. It would give some cover, except that the address they were heading for--assuming Bucky had given him the right one--was on the north.

Bucky started moving again, hands in pockets now. He led Sam to a storefront with a solid security gate pulled down and locked. Sam didn't let himself look around to see if they were being watched, because that would only look sketchier--if they made it through this without having to deal with the NYPD on top of whatever Bucky had planned Sam would thank God on his knees for it. Bucky bent down and snapped the lock in less time than it probably would have taken him to open it with a key. Sam caught only a glimpse of his metal fingers before Bucky tucked the broken lock into his sweatshirt pocket. He pulled the gate up with his right hand, ushering Sam ahead of him toward the door of, allegedly, a button wholesaler. There were faded displays in the plate glass windows, all kinds of buttons dangling on strings arranged in a rainbow spectrum. 

Bucky picked the lock on the door almost as quickly as he'd broken the one on the gate and walked in ahead of Sam, moving confidently to an alarm keypad to punch in a code. He didn't bother to turn a light on, but the midday light filtering through the window displays lit the room with a dusty indirect glow.

"You've been here before," Sam observed, turning the lock of the door behind them. This area looked like exactly what it was supposed to be, shelves and racks of buttons and a counter at the back. _Nothing exciting_.

"A few years ago," Bucky agreed, taking off his hat and sunglasses and dropping them on the counter. He didn't bother to hide his bare metal hand now that they were off the street. He unzipped his sweatshirt to reveal a plain black t-shirt beneath. It was warm in the little storefront space--obviously no one had turned on the air conditioning in months--and Bucky probably ran as hot as Steve did. He certainly liked to wear his t-shirts just as tight as Steve did.

Bucky turned his back to Sam, fiddling with the keypad, as he added, "I wasn't Bucky then. I reported back here after a mission. I think they--stored me here for a while."

He cut a look over his shoulder at Sam, like the idea of Bucky being stored between missions might be a surprise to him. 

Sam nodded calm acknowlegement. He'd had a lot of practice at that particular nod. The next question popped out automatically. "Does it bother you, being here?"

Bucky turned half toward him at that and shook his head quickly, waving his right hand to dispel the concern. "I messed up my arm, I came here to get it fixed. That's why I wanted to come--I think the toolkit will still be here, maybe a repair manual."

"Oh," Sam said, because that was surprisingly reasonable. He immediately felt like something worse than an asshole--a bad person, bad for Bucky--when he realized that it was a surprise. He and Steve had spent so much time dissecting every hint of a reaction they saw from Bucky that he was used to thinking of Bucky as a black box, all his interior workings totally opaque, but Bucky was a person. He was perfectly capable of making logical decisions about stuff he needed to do. 

This was just an errand Bucky needed to run. Sam was pretty sure he'd done something like this with Riley at least once before a deployment, trying to find old gear at Riley's mom's house. It was a good memory, if a weird one to have in his head alongside anything to do with Bucky.

"It's good, though," Bucky said haltingly, still half turned toward Sam. His posture turned wary in a way that didn't match what he was actually saying. "Having someone here. You, I mean. Having you here."

 _Jesus Christ, this actually is a date_. Sam stared at Bucky for a frozen instant as he realized that Bucky wanted him here, not for backup, but because Bucky wanted to spend time with him. He'd brought pizza and everything. 

That also went on the list of things Sam should have thought of and hadn't: he'd never asked himself whether _Bucky_ thought they were in a relationship. 

Bucky's wary stance hardened and he started to turn away again, and Sam said, "Bucky, hey," as he started to cross the room, more to warn Bucky that he was moving in than because he thought words would accomplish anything.

Bucky stayed exactly still, showing his back to Sam, and Sam didn't let himself think too hard about that as a gesture before he reached out and set his hand lightly on the side of Bucky's left arm. He could feel the metal rigidity through the sleeve, but according to the files he and Steve had gotten hold of, Bucky would be able to feel the touch.

"I'm glad you asked me," Sam said. He was even more glad he'd said yes, now that he knew. 

Bucky turned at that, moving into Sam's hand instead of away, slow enough not to shake off the touch. Sam couldn't read his expression, but Bucky's eyes were intent on him.

"I'm glad to be here with you," Sam reiterated, and God, he was. He was glad for what it meant about Bucky, glad to be trusted and chosen. He was even glad to be going on one more Hydra adventure, even if it was just hunting for a lost toolkit someone had probably stashed in a closet. 

Bucky's right hand came up to close around Sam's wrist in a careful grip, and Bucky tugged Sam's hand over from his arm to rest on his chest. That left just a thin t-shirt between Sam's hand and Bucky's skin. He could feel Bucky's heart beating against his fingers, and this felt closer than the other night in his kitchen even if they had a couple of feet of space between their bodies. They were touching now, and Bucky had asked for this instead of just pushing his way in. 

Bucky's gaze slipped away from Sam's, looking over his shoulder to the windows on the street. 

"We should go in," he said quietly, letting go of Sam's wrist as he turned away. Sam let his hand drop but stayed right where he was, nearly pressed up against Bucky's back. He let himself enjoy the glimpse of the pale nape of Bucky's neck he could see where Bucky's hair fell unevenly over the hood of his sweatshirt. He didn't even have to feel bad about looking, apparently, because this was a date.

A door popped open from what had looked like a solid wall beside the keypad, and Bucky looked over at Sam as he opened it the rest of the way. The door was about four inches thick, and from the look of the edge it was reinforced steel; it was probably stronger than the actual walls of a building like this. It was dark on the other side of the door, and the air that followed the swing of the door was cool and still. Basement air.

Bucky didn't make a move to go through. He said, "You don't have your earpiece."

"In my pocket," Sam shrugged. Bucky's earpiece, wherever he'd left it, still hadn't shown up in range. "I figured this was just you-and-me time. Steve doesn't need to listen in."

Bucky said, "We should play him some music," and Sam could have sworn there was a smile in his voice. Bucky turned away toward the door without giving Sam a look at his face, descending quickly into the dark.

Sam followed a step behind. Lights came on when they were halfway down, strips glowing on the stairs and along the walls; there was no sound, but something made Sam look back to see that that heavy door had sealed behind them, leaving a featureless blackness at the top of the stairs.

Bucky said, "Go back a step, it'll open."

Sam looked down and saw that Bucky was waiting on the last step of the stairs, looking up at him. Sam took a cautious step back up, and the door popped open, letting afternoon light in around the edges. Sam stepped down again and the door sealed. 

Instead of stepping up one more time to test it, he looked down to Bucky and said, "That's kind of a weird security feature."

"It's not security," Bucky said absently as he stepped off the staircase, which made overhead lights come on in the hallway there. "It's fire safety."

Sam snorted at the thought of a fire marshal inspecting this place and hurried down to join Bucky. They were standing in a hallway right out of a text adventure game, with two ordinary-looking doors and one made of heavy steel with bars on the outside.

It wasn't much of a surprise when Bucky nodded toward that door and said, "In there."

Sam registered that the room was constructed to be able to lock something--someone--inside as he followed Bucky in, but when he looked back he noticed it all worked the other way, too, bars and locks on both sides. That wasn't reassuring. Sam turned his attention to Bucky, who was looking around the room they'd entered.

There were rows and rows of drawers in the walls. Piles of bankers boxes, plus a few wooden crates, were stacked up nearly head-high in the middle. Bucky was frowning as he looked around, and Sam thought this was going to be a long afternoon of opening and closing drawers and looking through boxes. 

That was how that day with Riley had gone, too; Riley's mom's house had an attic _and_ a basement, and they'd wound up finding the last of Riley's stuff in the guest room closet twelve hours later. They'd gotten into about four different fights in the process, and Sam had given Riley shit about his ability to locate anything for weeks.

"Where should we start?" Sam asked.

Bucky shook his head and turned toward the boxes piled in the middle of the room, walking around to the far side of them. Sam followed, coming around the bulk of the pile just in time to watch Bucky grab the tarp covering something that had been hidden when they walked in. 

He yanked it off, revealing a dentist's chair with a standing computer station beside it sporting multiple monitors. There was a circular thing fixed above the chair like a huge black halo, the top punctuated with curving mechanical parts sticking out of the loop. The arms of the chair had heavy curving pieces of metal hanging off: upper and lower restraints for the right arm, one huge lower restraint for the left. 

What Sam was seeing snapped into focus: not a chair with restraints, computers, a weird metal ring, but the _prep station_ described in half a dozen files they'd found relating to the Winter Soldier. This was where Bucky's mind had been manipulated, memories erased, programming implanted. This was where they'd made the Soldier what he was. The files described the torture and brainwashing with such cold brutality that Sam had barely been able to force himself to read the words on the page. Steve had nightmares roughly one night of every three about what had been done to Bucky with this equipment. 

Bucky stood there with the tarp in his hands and that blank, distant expression on his face. He was back there, Sam knew, back in that chair, back with Hydra; he was barely out of arm's reach, but he was further away than he'd been when Steve and Sam had begun their search for him.

Sam had followed Steve on his self-appointed mission for Steve's sake, for the sake of Bucky as any veteran--somebody else's Riley. Sam hadn't known Bucky at all. In the last month Bucky had become familiar in a certain way, but bringing him in had still mattered to Sam mostly for the sake of Steve's happiness, or because it was the right thing to do.

It was only right now, watching Bucky go back there again, that Sam wanted desperately to find Bucky so that Bucky would be here, where Sam was, with him on the weirdest date ever. He'd barely ever had Bucky, but it hit Sam in the gut right then how badly he wanted him back.

Sam still knew better than to try to touch him to do it. He looked around, made his voice and his posture calm and casual, like he was standing in Riley's mom's basement and there was no chance of dying if he said this wrong.

"You think the toolkit's here somewhere?"

Bucky looked at him for a few seconds like he didn't know who Sam was, and then Sam's heart began to race and he had to fight a huge, triumphant grin, because he saw Bucky come back to himself. To Sam. 

"In there, probably," Bucky said, nodding toward the computer station. Sam knelt. He felt shaky with the invisible enormity of what had just happened and forced himself not to dwell on it. He'd spoken, Bucky had answered. They were on a date, they were here together. That was enough for the moment.

Sam opened the lower doors of the cabinet and pulled out the first thing he saw that looked like a toolkit. He ignored the can of compressed air, spare mouse, and abandoned empty bottle of Mountain Dew.

Bucky dropped the tarp and kicked it aside, crouching next to Sam to take the toolkit from him, their hands not quite touching. Sam braced himself for the sight of whatever might be inside the box, but it really was just a toolkit--there was a set of tiny screwdrivers and wire-thin picks in the top tray, and when Bucky lifted that out and handed it to Sam to hold, he revealed a small soldering iron, a voltmeter, more probes, and something that was probably a diagnostic readout screen, set on coils of cords, along with various spools of wire and sealed plastic boxes that probably contained other small replacement components.

"That what you needed?" Sam asked, already shifting his weight to stand. He had Bucky with him for now, and he really didn't want to stay here longer than they had to and give him more chances to get lost.

Bucky was frowning, poking a finger through the stuff in the box. When he looked up at Sam he looked simply, openly uncertain. "It seems like the right stuff. I was hoping there would be instructions. I don't actually know how it works."

Sam turned and started looking through the cupboard again before he'd really registered what Bucky said. _I don't actually know how it works_. He clamped down on horror and rage and tried to think of something supportive to say that matched Bucky's offhand remark. 

"No time like the present to learn," Sam tried, while poking through dust rags and cables, fishing out a couple of three-ring binders.

"Yeah," Bucky said, and something in his tone made Sam look back at him. He was frowning down at his left arm. "I need to learn to take care of myself. That includes my arm."

"Seems like you're doing a pretty good job taking care of yourself so far," Sam said. 

Bucky looked up at him sharply; Sam caught a flash of startled pleasure on his face that vanished as quickly as it appeared. Sam wondered if anybody had told Bucky he was doing a good job of anything other than killing people since 1944. He had to look away again, pulling stuff out of the cabinet.

Sam offered Bucky the three-ring binders. Bucky set the toolkit down and dropped the binders on the seat of the chair, metal fingers glinting as he opened them up and paged through the plastic-laminated pages. None of them looked to be anything about how to operate, or operate on, an impossibly complex mechanical arm.

"You ever need a couple extra hands to work on it," Sam said lightly. "You know I'm your guy, right?"

Bucky looked up from the binder and studied him for a moment--long enough for Sam to wonder if that had been too much of a declaration, if _I'm your guy_ meant more than he'd meant it to, or just exactly as much. It felt like another victory when Bucky gave him a tiny, shallow nod.

Sam looked away before he could push that any further, pulling out a cardboard box from the back of the cupboard. For a moment he thought it was innocuous: it looked like a first aid kit, full of tape and sealed sterile packs of gauze. Then it occurred to him why it was _here_.

Bucky reached past him, fishing out something that looked weirdly like an ice cream bar in an opaque, unlabeled white wrapper. Sam watched as Bucky opened it, revealing a mouthguard made of dark, dense gray rubber. It really was shaped like ice cream on a stick; it had a piece sticking straight out from the vicinity of the front teeth, which would allow someone to push it into another person's mouth without putting their fingers between his teeth.

Bucky didn't go away this time. He was right there, studying the thing intently, and as Sam watched he touched the mouthguard to his lips and sniffed it. 

Smell was one of the strongest triggers of memory, Sam knew. When he'd swung on the EXO-7 for the first time after Steve and Natasha liberated it from Fort Meade, the first breath he took that smelled of the particular blend of plastics had shaken him almost off his feet. He'd been back there again, suiting up with Riley to go out for that last jump.

Bucky didn't visibly react at all. He flicked his tongue out to lick the thing. It was such a sickening contrast to Bucky on the street outside licking grease from his fingers that Sam couldn't help twitching a little at the sight.

Bucky's attention jerked away from the mouthguard, settling on Sam. He still held the mouthguard to his lips for a few seconds while he met Sam's gaze--present, cognizant, aware.

He lowered his hand and said, "There are computers in one of the other rooms. Could you check if there are instructions there?"

"Yeah, I'm on it," Sam said, straightening up. If Bucky had it together enough to be indirect and polite about asking for time alone with the instruments of his torture, then he was probably going to hold it together enough to use that time however he wanted to. Bucky was asking to be trusted again, and Sam had to give him that, even if it might mean having to pull him out of his own head later.

Bucky straightened up and stepped back, grabbing the binders from the chair while Sam sidestepped away from it. Bucky had moved out of Sam's easy reach, so Sam settled for just doing what Bucky had asked and leaving the room. He hesitated in the hallway, listening, but Bucky didn't make a sound. Sam decided against looking back.

One of the other two rooms off the hallway was a break room. There was a table with flimsy chairs around it, a sink and some cupboards, and a bathroom. Sam stared at it for a moment; it was somehow more horrifying than the room behind the barred door, even though that was the one full of Hydra secrets and mad science equipment. He shut the light off and pulled the door shut, turning away to the room on the opposite side of the hall. This one looked more like an office, with three workstations along two of the walls. Sam went around and turned all the computers on, and then made another lap to plug in flash drives. He never went anywhere without a couple of little high-capacity ones in his pocket these days and there was another one in his Leatherman, so he could pull at least some files off each machine.

When he came back to the first computer again he was already thinking of what kind of hunting he might have to do to track down the right files. He wasn't Natasha, but he knew how to get around a Hydra file system these days. 

He didn't need to, though. It was right there on the desktop: an icon of a red five-point star. Sam braced himself and clicked, and a file directory opened up. There were folders listed-- _Repair, Maintenance, Storage_ \--and a few files visible at the top level. Sam clicked on _Procedures Overview_ before he could think better of it.

_Facility will be alerted when the asset is active. If asset returns under his own power he will use his own access codes and should not be impeded in entering the facility. Do not speak to the asset. **Do not step into the asset's path.**_

Sam's whole body jerked in negation, and he nearly knocked the mouse off the desk grabbing for it to close the file. He set the entire red star directory to copy over to his flash drive, though. Once it was going he moved around the other computers to check for interesting files to grab, just to give himself something else to focus on. 

Even when he got the words out of his head--along with the image they conjured up of Bucky strolling in here to be put into that chair again, Bucky _going back there_ \--he couldn't let go of the way he hadn't even had to look. There was a fucking _desktop shortcut_ for _brainwashing procedures_. It was just something that might come up in a workday in this place, not worth keeping secret from anybody who could get in here in the first place.

Somebody had been drinking Mountain Dew at that computer station. Someone had cleaned the keyboard out with compressed air, checked that the mouse worked all right, and then put Bucky in that chair and wiped him like a hard drive, fried his brain and then put him into a deep-freeze until the next time they needed him. _Repair. Maintenance. Storage._ Like he was a goddamn spare PC. 

Sam wanted to smash every computer in here, wanted to burn the place to ashes, and he made himself step back and take a few deep breaths, talking himself down. He wasn't here to get mad about this; he was here for Bucky. He'd gotten the files Bucky needed, and Bucky had the toolkit, and maybe that meant they could get the hell out of this place and never come back.

Sam pocketed the flash drives and headed back to the other room. He hadn't heard a sound from Bucky while he was gone, but when he stepped past the barred door he heard a faint, rhythmic clicking. Sam walked softly as he moved farther in, his steps falling irresistibly into the cadence of the clicks. He hesitated right at the edge of the boxes and looked from half-cover, almost holding his breath to keep quiet.

Bucky was sitting in the chair, stripped to the waist, feet primly side by side in front of him. He had the restraint cuffs resting on top of his right wrist and upper arm; the metal was black against his bare skin, a warmer shade of white guy than Sam would have expected. His metal wrist was twisting, making the cuff on that side move back and forth. It clicked each time. 

That mouthguard was covering his teeth, and he had his head tilted back, looking up at the piece that was obviously supposed to come down onto his head and wipe his memories, make him into a weapon again. His gaze flicked to Sam, settling just long enough to show total unconcern at Sam seeing him like this--and enough for Sam to recognize Bucky, to know he was still present--and then he looked up again.

Bucky's left arm stilled, and his right arm lifted smoothly free of the restraints, rising over his head to tap lightly against the headpiece up above him. There was something really weird about the way Bucky moved, the way he was sitting all the way back against the seat. It took Sam a second to identify it.

Bucky was relaxed.

It hit Sam then that this hadn't only been routine for the people who did this to Bucky. It had been Bucky's routine, too. _Nothing exciting._

This place was familiar to Bucky. He had only fragments of memories, and all his memories of being _Bucky_ would be of places that were long gone now. This was where he'd reported in after a mission, gotten his arm fixed, received instructions. He was in a secure location; he could let his guard down. 

Bucky spit out the mouthguard, holding it by the stem as he said, "It's okay, I don't know how to work this either."

He didn't look at Sam as he spoke, but that was more than acquiescence to his presence; that was an invitation. Sam went to Bucky's side, leaning back against the crates so he didn't loom over Bucky and didn't look like he was about to do anything with that computer setup, even if it was all turned off. Bucky shifted in the chair, sliding his legs apart and letting one hang off, tilting a little toward Sam. He touched the mouthguard to his mouth again, but didn't put it back in. Even now, with Sam right there, Bucky stayed relaxed, not tensing a single muscle Sam could see.

Sam tried not to stare at the raised scars that marked the place where Bucky's metal shoulder ran into the flesh. He looked more naked there than anywhere else: small brown nipples, hairless belly, exposed armpit, bared throat. The skin next to the shine of metal looked vulnerable, like flesh under a knife's blade. 

"I don't know why," Bucky added, looking up at the headpiece again and then back at Sam with an impossible little smile. "They could've made me self-deleting, let me clean up all my own messes. Do the job and then put myself away for next time."

Sam nodded slowly and decided to just take this whole thing at face value, because if he thought about it he was going to lose his shit in a way that wouldn't help anyone. He had Bucky here. He just had to focus on Bucky. "Maybe they were worried that you'd realize if you could control one half you could control the other half."

"Program myself, you mean?" Bucky snorted, shaking his head. "That's the whole point. Once I wiped my own brain I wouldn't remember how. Somebody else always has to give the orders."

Sam nodded again, looking over the computer setup, reassuring himself that it was all safely dark and inert. Nobody was giving any orders today.

"There's probably a phone app for that now," Bucky went on. "I bet you could do it. Program me."

"Yeah?" Sam said, swallowing horror and nearly matching Bucky's casual tone. "If I could, who would you want to be?"

Sam looked over at Bucky as he said it. He realized what the answer was going to be when he did, from the almost-smile on Bucky's parted lips, the pointed slouch, and the way Bucky was looking up at him through his eyelashes. It was a parody of an invitation, maybe the only way Bucky knew to do it.

"Who do you want me to be?"

Sam had seen it coming, but it still took an effort to keep his expression neutral, to smile a little as he shook his head. "I asked you first, man. Who do you want to be?"

Bucky's forehead tensed in a frown, and he closed his teeth absently on the back of the mouthguard, biting it a couple of times before he shrugged stiffly and said, "Bucky. I want to be Bucky. Too bad nobody made a copy of him before they wiped him the first time, they could just load him back in here, make me work right on the first try."

That was an awful answer and at the same time it was a good one, good like Steve was good sometimes; it made Sam's chest hurt in the same way, and he had to press his hands to his thighs to keep from trying to hug Bucky.

"Your turn," Bucky said, reaching out one foot to nudge Sam's thigh with his booted toe. "Who would you make me be?"

Sam swallowed and shook his head, raising both hands. "I wouldn't if I could, man."

Bucky made almost exactly the same face he'd made when Sam had told him he should eat his spinach. He straightened up slightly, shoulders going tight for the first time. "Right, I have to do it myself. I know. I just--if I could really be Bucky...."

"Man, if there was some way I could help you be who you want to be, I would," Sam said. 

Bucky's shoulders sagged as he looked at Sam, bewildered.

"What I mean is I wouldn't want you to be anyone else," Sam explained, and he thought, with a weird, stunned clarity, _I think I'm falling in love with you_. "I like the guy you are right now. I think you should stick with him. With you."

Bucky looked wary, but Sam took a chance and leaned in, tapping his fingers gently against Bucky's forehead. "This guy right here. The one who's had my back for the last month. The one who kissed me the other night and asked me to come here with him today."

Bucky didn't move away from Sam's fingers, and his forehead wrinkled into a frown again under Sam's hand. "I don't know who the hell that is."

Sam shook his head a little. He didn't either, but he sure as hell wanted time and the chance to find out. "Nobody starts out knowing who they are. You figure it out by the choices you make, how you react to the stuff that happens to you. If you're lucky you have some friends to help you along the way."

Bucky reached up with his right hand, even though that meant reaching across himself. He curled his fingers lightly around Sam's wrist before he said, "I have you."

Sam nodded and had to swallow hard before he said it, because it was absolutely, unmistakably a declaration this time. "Yeah, you do."

"You're my friend," Bucky said, eyes narrowing in concentration.

"Yeah," Sam agreed. They could call it that. It wasn't untrue. "I am."

Bucky raised his metal hand and set it against Sam's ribs, using both hands to gently but firmly pull Sam closer until Sam swung his leg out to save his balance and wound up straddling Bucky in the chair. It occurred to him that that might not have been what Bucky was going for, but he shifted so he was sitting straight in the chair again and switched to pulling down. Sam settled his weight gingerly on Bucky's thighs, resisting the impulse to steady himself by putting his hands on any of the bare skin Bucky was displaying.

"We gonna break this thing?" Sam asked, even as he realized that it would be fucking fantastic if they did.

"Nah," Bucky said absently, releasing Sam's wrist to raise his right hand to Sam's neck. "It's pretty strong."

Sam tilted his chin up and kept his own hands resting on his thighs, not resisting Bucky's hand at his throat. Bucky's fingers settled on his pulse point at the same time Bucky's metal hand rose to his shoulder, drawing Sam down closer to him. Bucky was looking _at_ his eyes rather than into them now; he was watching pupil response, if Sam was any judge. It had been a long time since his SERE training, but Sam didn't want to resist this interrogation at all.

"Say it again," Bucky said, closer to a plea than a demand.

"You've got me," Sam repeated with all the conviction he had for anything. This was a promise. This was for the long haul. "I'm your friend. I want to help you."

"Who do you want me to be," Bucky insisted. The weight of Bucky's left hand was cool and still on Sam's shoulder, but the fingers against his pulse shifted minutely with Bucky's breathing, which was speeding up.

"I want you to be you," Sam said, resting some of his weight against Bucky's metal hand on his shoulder. "You don't have to be anybody else for me." 

Bucky's lips moved but he didn't make a sound, and his hand flattened against Sam's throat, not squeezing, just touching all the skin he could reach.

Sam went on, driving the point home. "Even if you could rewind to be some version of yourself who never fell from that train, I don't think you should try to pretend the last seventy years never happened to you. This is who you are. This is who I came here with today. You."

Bucky was starting to look desperately overwhelmed, his expression fixed like he was bracing himself against pain. Sam waited for another question, or for Bucky to throw him into the wall behind him, or--

Bucky's hand shifted from his throat to the back of his neck, pulling him closer. Sam brought his right hand up as Bucky pulled him down, and it landed right on the join between Bucky's metal arm and his flesh; Sam could feel the ridges of scars under his thumb, cool metal under his fingers. Bucky went still for a second, his gaze sharpening again, gauging Sam's response.

Sam shifted his hand up, keeping it right there on the place where the metal and man ran into each other, and leaned in for a kiss. Bucky shivered into it, his hand tightening on the back of Sam's neck as his lips parted under Sam's. 

Sam kept it light, running his left hand from Bucky's shoulder to his elbow, trying to convey _this is okay, you're okay_ , with his whole body. He waited for Bucky to push for more than gentle kisses and glancing contact; what Sam got was Bucky's fingers slipping from the nape of his neck down to the collar of his shirt, Bucky's thumb flirting with the edge before Bucky's hand slid down to his chest. He was nowhere near pushing Sam away; he was mirroring Sam's touch on his shoulder, rubbing his palm against Sam's collarbone through his t-shirt.

They could do better than that, though.

"Hey, hang on a sec," Sam said, his lips hovering just off Bucky's. 

Bucky let his head fall back and looked up at Sam, his parted lips pink and wet. He looked a little dazed and entirely human now, his silent shell broken open. Sam had to kiss him one more time, just to feel the way Bucky kissed him back, soft and sweet. Sam finally made himself straighten up, away from both of Bucky's hands. He took his own hands off Bucky and reached back for his shirt.

"I'm gonna take this off, okay?" Sam said. "That way we'll be even."

Bucky actually glanced down at himself, like it hadn't occurred to him that he had his shirt off, or that Sam might join him in half-nakedness. 

"Okay?" Sam repeated, hands still hovering at the back of his neck. It was a weird position, surprisingly exposed; he could feel himself sweating in the cool air, and he was aware that Bucky could throw him just by flexing his thighs right now.

Bucky swallowed and nodded. His right hand settled lightly on Sam's leg. "Okay. Yeah."

Sam tugged his shirt off and threw it away, leaning in for another kiss as soon as it was gone and getting his hands back on Bucky. Bucky's right hand slid up quickly to his side, settling warmly there, and Sam had been kissing him for a little while when it occurred to him that they still weren't quite even. He ran his right hand down the cool, motionless surface of Bucky's left arm, finding his left hand curled in a loose fist, held out to the side. Bucky's metal hand twitched under Sam's touch, and Sam closed his hand firmly around Bucky's fingers, pulling them in.

Bucky could more or less stop speeding trains with his left hand if he wanted to, but he didn't resist Sam's grip as Sam pulled his hand in. He let his hand be flattened against Sam's chest, Sam's fingers splayed across his. 

"I know you can't feel things the same way," Sam said, brushing another kiss down over Bucky's softly open mouth, "but I don't mind--"

Bucky let out a shaky breath against Sam's lips and tugged his metal hand free of Sam's; Sam was aware of the cool pressure of Bucky's arm around the small of his back for a second before Bucky's whole body flexed under his. Sam was suddenly getting _moved_ in the way that no one but Steve--or Bucky, obviously--could move him. Bucky boosted him up and swung him around so that he was being settled gently into the chair, legs still spread around Bucky's with Bucky braced over him, before Sam even knew what was happening. 

Bucky didn't give him a lot of time to think about it after he put Sam back down, pressing against him from crotch to chest. Bucky kissed him hard as the adrenaline hit Sam, leaving him feeling slightly dislocated from everything but Bucky's body pressed hot against his. Sam was revved up higher now, tightening his thighs around Bucky's hips and trying his best to thrust up as his increasingly Pavlovian reaction to being manhandled by a supersoldier kicked in.

Bucky said something that sounded filthy and encouraging and also either Russian or just totally scrambled. Sam didn't care much either way, because Bucky's left hand was tight on his hip just to the edge of pain, and Bucky's right hand was roaming restlessly over Sam from his throat to the top of his jeans. Bucky was hard, grinding against Sam and kissing him in a hungry rush. Just when Sam thought he was going to have to seriously struggle for air, Bucky's mouth broke away, trailing kisses down his throat that were as much teeth as lips, making Sam arch under his weight.

"At least get your pants open this time," Sam demanded as Bucky thrust against him, a smooth rolling motion. Sam put his hand on Bucky's back without thinking, just to feel the flex of muscle there. Bucky went still again, panting against Sam's throat. He was motionless except for minute twitches of his hips, pressing his dick against Sam's through their jeans. 

"Or mine, if you're not ready for yours," Sam added into the startling stillness. He was definitely going to come this time and he had no intention of doing that particular sticky walk of shame back to Stark Tower. 

"Okay," Bucky said, sounding weirdly definite and serious.

Sam was laughing, startled, as Bucky shifted his weight, sliding down onto his knees between Sam's legs as he jerked Sam's jeans open. Sam's hand slid up with the motion, landing on the nape of Bucky's neck under the silky fall of his hair. Sam registered that he shouldn't hold on right there at the same time that Bucky pulled Sam's dick out. Every good and careful instinct Sam had collapsed into a broken noise coming out of his mouth when he saw Bucky's hand close on his dick. Bucky's eyes were bright and fascinated, looking at Sam like something he wanted. Maybe like _everything_ he wanted.

Bucky's eyes flicked up to meet Sam's, and Bucky smiled, a bright, uncomplicated grin that Sam had seen pictures of. He'd seen it in motion in old videos: that was _Bucky_ smiling at him. Sam thought _Steve should be seeing this_ even as Bucky's tongue flicked out over the head of his dick. Sam had to squeeze his eyes shut and bite down on his knuckles to hold off a wave of feeling that went way beyond what Bucky was doing with his tongue.

Bucky's mouth closed on him, feeling fever-hot. Sam gasped as Bucky sucked him, his hand and tongue working together to make Sam's spine melt. He had to look, and found Bucky still watching, looking up at him all bright-eyed and smug. Sam couldn't help jerking up at that, fucking his mouth just a little. Bucky made an encouraging noise, riding it out, and then went down further. 

Sam's head fell back, and he was staring at the black curve above his head for a few seconds--Bucky's mouth slipped off him, hand coming up and then sliding down with a slick wet sound as Bucky licked him again--before Sam really saw what he was looking at. His eyes dropped to Bucky again. This time he saw Bucky on his knees in the place where he'd been used by people who only saw him as a thing, who could make him do _anything_. 

Oh, hell no. 

"Bucky," Sam said, and Bucky closed his eyes and sucked harder. 

"Whoa," Sam said, "Bucky, hey--" he reached down, slid his fingers into Bucky's hair and tugged, "hey, come here."

Bucky's eyes opened again, a little wrinkle appearing on his forehead, but he took his mouth off Sam's dick and popped up to lean over him. He caught the halo overhead with his left hand, metal chiming against metal. He'd moved so quickly and smoothly that Sam's fingers were still in his hair, and Sam used that grip to pull him into a kiss as he said, "Stay here, stay with me."

"So sentimental," Bucky muttered against his mouth, sounding blurry and fond and _Brooklyn_.

Sam licked the taste of himself from Bucky's mouth. He closed his left arm around Bucky, pulling up to push his dick into Bucky's fist while Bucky stayed poised above him. 

Bucky's mouth slipped from his, and he muttered, "This okay? Too far?" as he kissed under Sam's ear. "You getting lonely yet?"

Sam tightened his grip in Bucky's hair, shaking him a little as he said, "Smartass." 

Bucky responded with a scrape of teeth and a tighter grip on Sam's cock. Sam groaned helplessly and let go of Bucky's hair to get his hand down to Bucky's jeans, feeling for his dick. Bucky's hand faltered a little on him and Bucky's breath puffed out against Sam's skin. 

"Can I?" Sam asked, rubbing the heel of his hand along the hard length of him. 

"Please," Bucky said, his hips jerking once before he made himself still again. 

Sam fumbled at the opening of Bucky's pants, hissing curses when he realized Bucky was wearing button-flies and again when Bucky started licking the line of his throat and working his dick before he got Bucky's pants open. 

"You can just say stop if you want me to stop, man, you don't have to distract me."

"Don't stop," Bucky muttered, and Sam could definitely hear him smiling now. "I like distracting you."

Sam made a triumphant noise as he finally got his hand on Bucky's dick, shoving his pants and underwear down enough to give himself some room, and Bucky moaned. Sam took his hand away just long enough to lick his fingers and then started jerking Bucky off. Bucky dropped his head, pressing his forehead against Sam's shoulder. Sam could feel Bucky's breath gusting against his skin, but Bucky didn't make another sound as Sam stroked. He mirrored Sam's movements, working him over with the same rhythm.

"You like that?" Sam murmured. "You gotta tell me if I can do better, I wanna know how you like it. You like this?" 

Sam changed up his grip and Bucky nodded against his shoulder; Sam watched him shiver a little, his back twitching and ass clenching. Bucky didn't stop the motion of his hand on Sam's dick. It was getting hard to think or concentrate or keep track of what was coming out of his mouth, but it mostly sounded like, "Yes, like that, you're so good, so fucking good--"

Bucky made a small sound, breath going out of him, and he came in Sam's hand, fucking Sam's fist in sharp movements, come wetting Sam's fingers and dripping down onto his dick. Bucky was still for a moment after, holding himself off of Sam, and Sam kept his hand curled loosely around Bucky's dick, rubbing his back in slow movements.

Bucky picked his head up and kissed Sam after a while. His mouth was soft again, lazy now that he'd gotten off. When he got back to jerking Sam it was a little bit wetter, the sharp smell of come rising up between their bodies. 

"Come on," Bucky coaxed between kisses, "come on, your turn, show me, let me see--"

Sam tilted his head back and gave himself up, dimly aware of Bucky trailing stinging kisses along his collarbone as he jerked Sam through it. 

When Bucky's mouth brushed his again Sam opened his eyes and tightened his arm around Bucky's back. "You think you're gonna squish me, man? Come here, what are you doing? You're not that big."

Bucky huffed a little--and didn't actually lower his metal arm--but he did rest his weight at least partially against Sam so that they were pressed together, sweaty-hot, from groin to shoulder. Sam nuzzled into Bucky's hair and let his eyes close again, holding on, counting out the seconds while Bucky actually let himself be held. He lasted a few minutes longer than he had the first time before he said, "Let me go a minute."

Sam folded his arms behind his head, opening his eyes as he did, but Bucky's right hand--still damp and smelling strongly of dick--brushed over his face. 

"Eyes closed," Bucky said softly. "Stay still for me, okay? Stay just like this." 

Sam nodded, squirming into a position he could hold. They could play any kind of little game Bucky wanted; Sam trusted him more than enough for this.

"Good," Bucky said, and Sam shivered lightly as Bucky's hands traced down the exposed backs of his arms, down over his chest to his hips. "You gonna get cold?"

Sam didn't open his eyes, kept his hands open. It hadn't been that kind of shiver at all. "You gonna leave me here for long?"

"Count to a hundred," Bucky said.

His lips pressed to Sam's for a second right before something soft--Sam's shirt, probably--landed in his lap. That covered his dick, at least, where it was still hanging out of his jeans. He could wait for a count of a hundred to put it on.

"Okay?" Bucky said. "You'll count?"

"One," Sam said under his breath, nodding. "Two, three--"

He trailed off to counting silently, but he didn't hear another sound from Bucky until he was in the eighties and caught soft footfalls coming into the room. 

Sam just had time to wonder where Bucky had gone and what he'd wanted before he heard Steve say, "Oh, God, _Sam_."

Sam's eyes flashed open instantly. He stared blankly at Steve--how was Steve here? Why? His brain was as frozen as the rest of him, still instinctively obeying the order to hold still. He saw the first shock on Steve's face turn into the horror of Sam not responding to him--here, in this place, in this _fucking chair_ , like Steve wasn't already having that nightmare three times a goddamn week without Sam acting it out for him. Steve folded down to his knees, pale as marble, as Sam surged up out of the chair to catch him.

"No, hey, no, it's me, I'm here," Sam said frantically, kneeling with his chest to Steve's, pressing his forehead against Steve's. "It's me, it's Sam, I know you. I know you. I'm okay."

"What," Steve said, sounding shocky and faraway even as his arms closed fiercely around Sam. "What--was that some kind of--did you think--"

"I didn't know you were going to walk in," Sam said. "Did he tell you to come here?"

"Yeah, he texted--asked how fast I could get here to pick you up," Steve said. That was good, that was a coherent answer to a direct question. It made Sam want to shake Bucky until his teeth rattled, but he could at least see what had happened here.

Steve pulled back with an actual muscle movement, not an uncontrolled sway, so Sam let him go far enough to make eye contact. Steve's gaze skipped past him to the chair and then back. 

"Was that--was that _Bucky's_ idea of a joke?" He was getting some color back, his expression moving from lost to hurt. "Because his sense of humor used to be kind of--but he was never that mean, not...."

 _Not to me_ , Sam filled in, and he was already shaking his head.

"No, no, it wasn't, Bucky didn't--" Sam made himself stop to take a breath and then finish a sentence, his hands framing Steve's face to keep his attention. "That was Bucky trying to _share_ , okay? I'm pretty sure he wanted you to pick up where he was leaving off, come and cuddle me because he couldn't hold still anymore."

Steve frowned. He looked to the chair again and then actually looked at Sam, gaze moving all the way down to his dick hanging out of his precariously sagging pants. When Steve's eyes came back up his fingers followed, touching a few spots along Sam's shoulder and throat that stung on contact. 

"Bucky did that," Steve said, fingertip moving gently against a spot Bucky had bitten and kissed a few minutes ago.

"I had sex with Bucky," Sam clarified, because he couldn't let Steve get the wrong end of the stick on this for a single second. "Second date, moving kind of fast, but what the hell. And then he told me to wait, and I thought I was waiting for him. I would never have done that to you. I don't think Bucky would, either, not on purpose. I don't think his theory of mind is up to anticipating how badly this place upsets you when it doesn't upset him."

Steve's gaze tore away from the chair and settled on Sam again. 

"It doesn't upset him," Steve repeated, and there was no question in the intonation.

"I don't think he," Sam started, but he could feel the way Steve's whole body was still on alert, still clocking that chair as an active threat. Sam was still being an idiot. 

"Hold that thought," Sam said. "We're getting out of here. You hate this place, we can talk somewhere else."

Steve actually didn't argue, which was the surest and most alarming sign that they needed to get the hell out of here right now. Steve hauled Sam up with him as he popped to his feet. Sam pulled away only to grab the shirt that had fallen off his lap when he came out of the chair. 

It was Bucky's black t-shirt. He looked for his own, but it was gone along with Bucky's hoodie. Sam snorted and pulled the thing on, and it strained over his shoulders and chest and barely met the top of his jeans when he pulled them up. He turned back to Steve as he got himself zipped and buttoned, and the shirt was good for that much--Steve was staring at Sam's chest now instead of the chair.

"He took mine," Sam explained, grabbing Steve's arm to turn him toward the door. Steve let himself be turned but grabbed Sam's wrist and moved him in turn, taking Sam's six. Sam didn't bother to argue the point. He led the way back out into the hallway and made for the stairs. 

He patted his pocket automatically as they passed the closed door of the room that held the computers, and realized the flash drives were gone. He wondered for a second if he'd left them in the computers, but he pulled out his Leatherman to check and, no, he had that one. Bucky had picked his pocket.

"Sam?" Steve said, crowding up behind him, and Sam realized he'd stopped walking. 

"It's fine," Sam said. "I pulled some files for Bucky from the computers here, and he took my flash drives." 

Sam pocketed his Leatherman again and fished out his earpiece, popping that in while he jogged up the stairs. The door was already open a crack as soon as he started up, and he found when he got there that there was a metal drawer full of buttons serving as a doorstop.

"Did you," Sam said, carefully stepping over it.

"Found it like that," Steve replied shortly, following him out, and the buttons rattled like a snake when the door was stopped from closing behind them.

Sam went straight to the front door, and when Steve had followed him out to the sidewalk he pulled the security gate down, letting it drop to the ground in a metal clatter. Sam turned to lean against it, looking out at the street, and Steve took up the same stance next to him, shoulder to shoulder.

He'd put as many barriers as he could between Steve and the thing triggering him. That was a start.

"You're not clearing that place," Sam said, before Steve could say anything about the amount of Hydra intel and materiel down there behind a bunch of doors they couldn't actually secure. "And I'm not, and we're not leaving it for Bucky to do."

"No," Steve agreed, and pulled out his phone. 

"Tony," Steve said a few seconds later, his voice brisk, all business. "Could you send some people to my location to clear out a Hydra facility? Just--" Steve's voice fell a little, obviously having been hung up on, "--the physical contents."

"Well, they'll probably show up in a van," Sam said, shrugging his shoulder against Steve's. "They can move things instead of shooting things."

Steve nodded, folding his arms over his chest, and said nothing.

"He wasn't unhappy in there," Sam said. "This wasn't Bucky facing down his demons. He wanted me to come with him because he wanted to spend time with me. He brought pizza. He wanted to hang out, and he wanted some help finding tools and instructions for working on his arm. As far as I could tell that's all this was to him."

Steve turned his head to actually look at Sam, meeting his eyes more or less steadily, and he said, "It was--but that _chair_ , he had to...."

Sam shook his head as Steve trailed off. "I can't tell you why the chair doesn't bother him more. That's a question you'd have to ask him. All I can tell you is it _didn't_. I went to check the computers and came back to find him sitting in it, just--relaxing, man, just kicking back. I know it has to have been more than that in his head, but it was the calmest I've ever seen him. He _talked_."

Steve raised his eyebrows and looked Sam over pointedly. "He talked?"

"First he talked," Sam said, daring a smile. He thought about trying to explain to Steve what they'd talked about, but it felt intensely private. Bucky had been a lot more naked, looking up at him and asking him to repeat that he liked him the way he was, than he had been with his dick in Sam's hand. 

Sam knew, with a bedrock certainty, that Steve would have said all the same things to Bucky about being fine just the way he was. He would have, and he would have meant it, but Steve wanted the other Bucky back, too. It would have been complicated for Steve, and Sam didn't want to step into the middle of that when he didn't have to. He especially didn't want to say _I think I know why he doesn't want to talk to you_ or _The guy you're in love with might be gone for good_. He didn't know if he'd ever be able to say that to Steve, and he certainly wasn't going to try it right now.

Instead, Sam shrugged and said, "I think it's just the most familiar place he knows right now."

Steve nodded, frowning. He opened his mouth to ask a question that he abandoned unspoken as a black tactical van pulled up to the curb. The front passenger door opened and Maria Hill jumped down, her suit jacket flaring briefly open to show the weapon holstered under her arm.

"Hey, Cap, Sam," she said, and then touched her ear and said, "Go back to the workshop, boss, we're clear here."

As she came closer, Maria raked an assessing look over Sam. Even though there wasn't a damn thing for her to see beyond the fit of his t-shirt, he could swear she knew exactly what he'd been up to. She reminded him eerily of his Training Instructor in Basic. 

She swept the same look over Steve and raised an eyebrow. "You guys leading the op?"

"All yours," Steve said, sweeping a bow as he bent down to grab the bottom of the gate and push it up. "The interesting stuff is downstairs, unless Stark Industries is going into fashion."

Maria's eyes narrowed, studying the window displays, and she said, "We'll take everything and let the techs sort it out. I'm making sure those are actually what they look like before I let Stark sew 'em all over anything."

Steve gave a sharp nod and started walking away as the Stark Industries people--looking a little disheveled in the way where they'd probably all just stripped out of their heavy tactical gear--started pouring out of the van to join Maria on the sidewalk. Sam nearly had to run to catch up with Steve's long strides before he got to the corner, but Steve didn't pull away when Sam fell in beside him. 

They were on the corner of Park Avenue, already nearly in the shadow of Stark Tower, when Steve said, "It didn't bother him, and it didn't bother you, either?"

Sam shrugged awkwardly. The information in the files had never gotten to him in quite the same way it got to Steve; he'd been able to accept that it was something that had happened to a guy he didn't know and move on. Now it was just a part of Bucky he'd always known; he could hurt for the guy, but the horror of it was muted. "I didn't like it. The whole place gave me the creeps. But I was following his lead. I wasn't going to mess with it when he was at ease for once."

The light changed, and Steve didn't say anything as they crossed the street. He didn't say anything for another four blocks, and he didn't say anything when both their phones gave the same loud chirp. Sam pulled his out to look down at Bucky's green icon, and then he looked over at Steve. They'd both stopped dead on the sidewalk; people were brushing by them on both sides.

Steve was looking down, his mouth a narrow line. He looked over at Sam, looked him up and down again--Bucky's shirt, and whatever else Steve had glimpsed on him before he put it on--and then his jaw clenched, his face going even more grim. His mouth opened, and Sam didn't think; he reached out, pressing his finger across Steve's lips.

Whatever he wanted to say to Bucky right this second, it was almost certainly going to be something that wouldn't help either one of them. Especially not Steve, once he'd come down from this edge of adrenaline and hurt and realized what he'd said.

Steve _glared_ at Sam for a second, but he stayed silent. In the next second he dropped his gaze, the stiffness going out of his shoulders, and Sam dropped his hand, feeling half-sick for taking Steve's anger away from him. Steve put his hand in the center of Sam's chest, pushing him gently but irresistibly to the wall of the building they stood beside and pressing him up against it for a kiss, not hurried or forceful, but thorough. Sam let him have his way for a couple of breaths and then brought up his hands to frame Steve's face and took charge, easing him down to a series of soft, brief kisses, until Steve let out a long sigh against his mouth, running his thumb down the side of Sam's throat.

"Let's take this inside, huh?" Sam said softly.

Steve nodded and turned sharply away, but he stood still until Sam was at his side. Sam didn't look over, but he saw Steve touch his ear once as they walked up the street toward Stark Tower. 

Sam didn't know how much of that Bucky might have been able to hear--the actual sound of kisses didn't carry through well, judging by Sperryville--but he was almost certainly listening now. Steve looked thoughtful all the way through the lobby of Stark Tower, vaguely abstracted while they waited for the elevator, but when the doors closed behind them and Steve hit the button for the 89th floor Sam could see that he'd come to some kind of decision.

His heart rate kicked up; apparently he was also starting to have a conditioned response to _Steve has a plan_. Steve having a plan usually called for mind-numbing levels of adrenaline at some point in the proceedings, so that was probably just as well.

"So," Steve said, standing at Sam's side, looking up at the floor numbers flowing smoothly past. "Here's how I think this should go."

Sam kept his eyes front, because apparently Steve was doing a thing here. He sounded calm and in control, but Steve sounded like that in a lot of situations where he was neither. Still, Sam would follow his lead. "Should I take notes?"

"I think you'll be able to remember," Steve assured him briskly. "Once we're behind a locked door, I'm going to push you up against the first available wall and kiss you for a while. Unless you have an objection to that?"

"No," Sam agreed, keeping a straight face and not letting himself hold his breath to listen for any sound in his right ear. "No objection. First available wall might actually be a window, though."

"That's fine, this time of day no one can see in from outside even if they do have a good angle on the eighty-ninth floor," Steve assured him. "And I understand you don't have any problem with heights."

"Kinda partial to them, if I'm honest," Sam agreed.

Steve nodded. "We're definitely going to get you out of your pants. Up to you if you'd rather be wearing Bucky's shirt for the next part, I'm flexible on that point."

"Much as I'm enjoying the shirt," Sam said, watching the numbers climb into the seventies. "It's a little tight. And I can see where it might get in the way."

Sam didn't think he'd imagined the little inhalation in his right ear, especially not when it was followed by a split-second startled look, and then a very small smile, on Steve's face.

Okay, well, this was also a way for Steve to deal with being jealous, and Sam was willing to trade Steve acting on his jealousy for Steve acting on being triggered half out of his mind. Especially if it was going where Sam thought it was going.

"This is the part where you say _I love it when a plan comes together_ ," Sam informed him helpfully.

Steve's eyes narrowed, although the smile lingered. " _MacGyver_?"

"So close," Sam said, as the elevator chimed softly and the doors slid open. " _The A-Team_."

Following Steve out of the elevator, Sam went on, "That one should be easy for you to remember, you're kind of on an A team your--"

That was as far as he got before Steve turned, pushed him up against the glass, and kissed him. His hands were spread wide over Sam's shoulders, and his kiss was faster and fiercer than he'd been on the street. 

Definitely a jealousy thing, then. Or maybe he was just trying to press hard enough for the kiss to carry right through Sam to Bucky. 

Either way, Sam could deal with it for today. He let himself sink back against the glass, let his mouth be easy under Steve's, taking what he was dishing out. Sam wasn't getting hard again just yet, but he could feel the little shivers of want starting up, feeling like aftershocks and like something new all at once. He could feel that Steve was ready for this, though he didn't make a big thing of it, didn't grind his dick against Sam. If Steve had bothered planning that part at all it'd be much later.

Then Steve did press full-length against him, startling Sam enough that he didn't realize he'd heard a noise until Steve was scrabbling his phone out of his pocket. 

Sam let his head fall back against the glass, telling himself that it made sense--Steve was too much on edge right now not to react to any phone call like an emergency. Sam watched through his eyelashes as Steve glanced at the phone's screen, and whatever he saw made his face set in tight, grim lines.

"Rogers."

Steve kept the volume turned down too low on his phone for Sam to overhear the other side of the conversation even this close, but Steve's face went from grim to frigid, and he didn't look at Sam.

"Copy that," Steve said, and ended the call.

"What..." Sam said, but he had a sinking feeling that he knew.

"Files," Steve said, taking another step back. "Hill's sending them."

Sam heard the buzz of Steve's phone in his hand. He didn't even have to ask which files. He knew. They would have been as obvious to Maria as they'd been to Sam.

So fucking much for getting Steve out of that basement. So much for getting Steve to focus on anything but this, even for a little while. Sam knocked the back of his head gently against the glass and told himself that he could not be mad at Maria for putting obvious mission objectives ahead of Steve's wellbeing, especially when Steve didn't want anyone--including himself--to realize how badly this affected him.

Steve was already frowning down at his phone, swiping at the screen. Sam could see the color going out of his face like he was bleeding somewhere. He couldn't help wanting to put pressure on it even though he'd watched Steve do this with Hydra files half a dozen times already. Steve had to know, and knowing was going to gut him. He'd be dealing with aftereffects for hours or days, depending on what exactly was in those files, just like every other time.

"Steve," Sam said, reaching out a hand.

Steve looked at Sam but didn't lift his head, didn't change his posture. Sam saw the rest of it in a fast, ugly flash: he could try to stop Steve from looking at those files when he was already in a bad place from seeing Sam in the chair, and this could turn into a fistful of fights all rolled into one. That glare on the sidewalk would be back, and not just for a second this time. Steve would be angry, instead of just bewildered, that Sam had been able to ignore the nature of the place where he'd had sex with Bucky. Sam would point out that he'd been the man on the ground, the one Bucky wanted there, the one who really knew Bucky now in a way Steve didn't. Nobody would win, and Steve would be furious and heartbroken on top of being triggered to hell and gone.

And Bucky, who was almost certainly still listening in, would be dragged along for the ride. Sam wondered what his breathing would sound like before he went out of range to avoid listening to them fight over him, and whether he'd ever come back after that.

"I'm gonna take a shower," Sam said, and he squeezed Steve's arm as he walked away.

* * *

Steve had switched to reading on a tablet, sitting at the kitchen table, when Sam came out of the shower. Sam looked over his shoulder and saw that he was paging rapidly through screen after screen of complex diagrams. 

He didn't think before he said, "Oh, good."

Sam winced even as he said it; Steve didn't so much freeze as turn to stone.

"That's what Bucky was looking for," Sam made himself say, calmly and conversationally. "Instructions for working on his arm."

"The files you pulled for him," Steve said, still absolutely still. There was no expression in his voice; Sam was filling in the accusation all by himself and he knew it. He also knew that that didn't necessarily mean he was wrong about what Steve meant.

"Yeah," Sam said, and then took himself off to the couch to stare at a movie with the sound turned down almost to silence. 

He pulled out his own phone, thought about texting Bucky, and then did the obvious thing and opened a new text to Mel. He stared at it for a while, trying to think of what he could tell her that didn't invade somebody's privacy or open a can of worms he didn't want to try to discuss in texts.

He actually laughed, sort of, when he thought of it. He saw Steve make a tiny movement in his peripheral vision at the sound, but Steve didn't say anything or really turn to look. Sam didn't look up from his phone.

_So my second date with B ended with a moving truck. Not even a joke._

Then Sam looked at the time--and then the calendar--and realized it was a weekday and Mel was in with a group right now. He pocketed his phone and went back to trying to watch the movie, and then the movie after that.

Steve had three more equally brusque phone calls, and from the few words Steve spoke Sam gathered that Maria was sending over more files, probably not about Bucky specifically. Sam wasn't going to say a word until Steve chose to apprise him, though, and Steve didn't budge.

Sam actually jumped when his own phone rang, loud in the silence. He saw Tony's name and braced himself even as he raised the phone to his ear; sure enough Tony was already in mid-conversation. "So you're seriously, honestly not going to let me make these things better?"

"I seriously honestly want exactly the same EXO-7 wings like you said you would make for me."

"Okay, well, come up to the roof and get 'em, then," Tony said. "Aesthetic improvements don't count, right?"

"What _aesthetic_ \--" Sam snapped, but Tony was gone.

Steve had turned in his chair, the tablet tilted negligently in his hand. His body was still held in grimly careful lines, and he looked drained, but he was looking. 

"My wings are ready, apparently," Sam said. For a half second, just as he was saying it, the possibility of having to ask Steve to come with him--of not being sure of Steve at his side--flashed through his mind. But even before he'd finished speaking Steve set the tablet down and moved to stand.

Sam got up then, and they met halfway; Steve pulled him into a fierce hug, and Sam held on just as tight. Only then, with Steve's arms tight around him, was he sure that however upset Steve was about this--and there was no end to how upset Steve probably was about this--he wasn't going to blame Sam for it. 

"It'll be good to get some air," Steve said, when he finally loosened his grip. 

Sam couldn't help laughing as they walked over to the elevator together, more from relief than the words. 

Steve gave him a quizzical look, the corner of his mouth tilting up, tentatively approaching a smile. Sam leaned in and gave him a quick kiss.

"I plan on getting a _lot_ of air," Sam said. Steve smiled, and that was enough to go on.

* * *

The sun was already sinking in the west by the time they got up to the roof, where Tony was waiting with a familiar-looking steel case on a table. Sam felt a rush of adrenaline. Those were his wings, and one way or another suiting up was always a life or death proposition. He'd been glad to know he was going to have them again up until right now; seeing the case he was suddenly aware of needing them like a missing limb or a lost love. 

Sam managed not to run across the roof to where Tony was standing. He crossed his arms and put on a decently practiced skeptical look. " _What aesthetic improvements_?"

Steve, at his shoulder, added dubiously, "You know that red and shiny is really not the idea with these, right?"

"Well if you'd let me outfit you with armor and repulsors, it wouldn't matter who could see you," Tony pointed out, "but, yes, thank you, Captain Human Target, I am aware of the concept of stealth."

Sam had to look over for the dryly dubious look on Steve's face, and didn't bother not to smirk himself as he looked back at Tony.

"Neither of you has said anything for me to not dignify with a response," Tony announced, turning away to open the case, and Sam felt a weird sharp surge of jealousy at someone else getting their hands on his wings. They weren't his yet, and of course Tony's hands were all over them. Still, he couldn't resist moving in to stand close while Tony pushed the lid back, revealing--Sam sighed helpless relief--a wing pack that looked exactly right, down to the same utilitarian gray materials he knew and loved.

"Mm-hm," Tony said. "Except--pick it up."

Sam did. The weight and the smell of it--he was on that rooftop with Steve and Natasha and Sitwell, just for the blink of an eye--were exactly right, too. He was starting to wonder if Tony had been just completely fucking with him, and then Sam lifted the wing pack free of the case and the whole thing disappeared. 

It was still there in his hands. Sam could feel the weight of it. He could smell the plastics, including the particular sharp-hot metal smell of recent work done; he itched to open it up and check every solder.

He just couldn't see it. He could see the palms of his hands right through the straps his fingers were curled around, and he could see the empty case and the table through the wing pack.

"Naturally you would go straight to invisibility," Steve said. 

That was enough to get Sam in motion again, swinging the pack into place and fastening it before he looked down to make sure that he was still visible himself while he wore it.

Tony made an irritated noise. "Not one exclamation of surprise? Nothing? I made it _invisible_. You barely had camouflage back in the day, Cap."

"Yeah, invisibility's nice and everything," Sam said, "but I'm mostly concerned about whether it flies."

Tony gave him a big faux-wounded look. 

Steve said, "And I do actually need to be able to see where Sam is sometimes."

"Yeah, yeah, it has a couple of different modes," Tony said impatiently. "Falcon, get your phone out, there's an app--"

And just like that, out of nowhere, Sam remembered Bucky saying _there's probably a phone app_. He felt a jolt of the same visceral horror he'd been watching Steve locked in battle with all day. Bucky in that chair, Bucky so fucking _calm_ about it--

Tony took a sharp step back and his gaze shot to Steve. Steve's hand touched Sam's shoulder lightly, unerringly finding his way in around the invisible gear. 

Bucky was fine, Sam reminded himself. He touched his ear--all he had to do was speak and Bucky would hear him. Bucky was safe and within his reach. Not lost, and not reprogrammed by anybody.

Sam shook his head and tugged his phone out of his pocket, offering it to Tony, who looked at Steve again and then shook his head. "JARVIS should have pushed it already. It'll be under your settings menu."

Sam looked--noting as he did that Bucky's icon was still green, Bucky was here, Bucky was all right--and, yes, under settings there was a new menu option: _Visibility_. It was a slider bar, currently set all the way to the left. Sam pushed it to the middle, and the wing pack returned to its normal gray.

He looked at Tony, who bounced a little on his heels, giving him an expectant look, and Sam said, "If it's red and gold--"

"Like I'd want anyone thinking I need _wings_ to fly, please," Tony said impatiently.

Sam sighed and pushed the slider bar the rest of the way over. 

The straps over his shoulders turned bright blue, each with a strip of glowing LED, and when he turned his head he got an impression of more blue and shining silver chrome accents. He stepped back and opened his wings, and found they were striped Air Force blue and gray, and the same LED glow ran around the edge of each wing, brighter at the points. 

Steve had a little delighted smile on his face, his eyes tracing every line of Sam's wings. They'd just about match if Steve was wearing the newer version of his uniform. When he met Sam's gaze his smile widened.

"Yeah, I guess these will do," Sam said, turning them back down to neutral visibility--Tony huffed--before he pocketed his phone. Sam shrugged out of the pack to kneel down with it, doing the familiar pre-flight checks. He focused on the machine under his hands, tuning out Tony alternately bitching about Sam's blatant distrust of his engineering and suggesting upgrades. When he'd done the whole checklist Sam put it on again.

The sun was nearly down by then, the eastern sky already turning a deep blue; Sam snapped on his new goggles gratefully. He'd rather not go blind flying west. There wasn't much cloud cover, but the day had been warm and was cooling now; he'd have a hell of a set of up- and downdrafts to watch out for between Midtown's skyscrapers and the city's heat. He pulled out his phone and checked the app he'd installed for himself on wind conditions and air traffic.

Then he pocketed the phone, flashed a grin at Steve, and turned and took off running for the edge of the roof that would give him the longest drop. It meant a good strong updraft, and also the best shot at having time for a parachute to open--but the second he jumped he knew he wasn't going to need to worry about any of that. He had _wings_ again, and he was soaring. 

He barely heard himself laughing over the wind in his ears as he swooped through the air, circling Stark tower, looking down at Tony and Steve looking up--he saw a flash of red, too, and realized that Tony had been ready to suit up and catch him. He gave them a little wing-waggle of acknowledgement before he flew off over Manhattan, testing the air and chasing the deepening clear blue of the sky. 

He had to concentrate at first, getting the feel of the new wings--they ran smooth in a way his old ones, and the ones he'd flown in DC, hadn't. They responded faster, and he had to train himself out of the compensations he'd gotten used to making, all while learning his way around the air currents over New York. For a while the challenge of it kept him from focusing on anything else.

By the time the sky had gone uniformly dark blue, though, he was flying north toward Harlem, meaning to look for the neighborhood where he'd grown up, which was safe since his folks had moved out of the city a few years ago. He was going to get enough of an earful about coming to New York and not visiting, but at least he wouldn't make it worse by getting spotted in the sky directly overhead.

He turned his head slightly to activate his flight comm, and abruptly realized that he was alone up here. No wingman, and no one able to hear him on the comms he did have. Steve--and Bucky, if Bucky was in range of Stark Tower--were both outside of his mile radius. Steve couldn't hear him even if Sam did come close enough; their earpieces didn't normally transmit to each other, and Sam hadn't thought to stop and change settings before he ran off to try his wings.

He missed Riley with a sudden intensity that he thought would drop him right out of the sky. He turned back before he even got as far as Harlem, aiming himself across the relative darkness of Central Park toward the bright towers of Midtown.

He was halfway there when a voice in his ear said calmly, "On your ten o'clock."

"Solid copy." Sam adjusted course automatically, scanning the southeast quadrant of the park for some sign. How the hell had Bucky spotted him?

He dropped altitude, waiting for another course heading. 

Instead Bucky said, "See me now?"

Sam turned automatically toward the on-and-off flash of light that accompanied the words, nearly at Fifth Avenue and not far below his current altitude. Treetop height, but not a tree. Bucky was on the roof of the Arsenal, Sam realized as glided over the zoo. Bucky was perched on a parapet edge at the highest part of the roof, and Sam, unable to resist, dropped neatly onto the opposite corner of the same ledge instead of landing on the flat roof.

He retracted his wings and pulled his goggles up, and realized that it wasn't as dark as he'd thought; plenty of light from the overlooking buildings spilled down, shining off the exposed metal of Bucky's left arm. 

Before Sam could jump down from the ledge, Bucky was walking--steadily, unconcernedly, five stories up--across the ledge to where Sam was standing. He was nearly within arm's reach when Sam recognized his own t-shirt, more by the shape of it than the color; Bucky looked like he was swimming in it compared to the shirt he'd had on earlier.

"That's a good look," Sam said, reaching out to touch the edge of the sleeve.

Bucky smiled, his teeth flashing white, and he reached out himself, but lower, slipping his fingers into Sam's front pants pocket. "Thanks for those. And the shirt."

"You know stealing stuff and then thanking me for it isn't really how that's supposed to work," Sam said, touching the shape of the flash drives Bucky had returned to him. He abruptly realized that Steve could probably hear them now--or, more precisely, could hear Bucky. Sam still wasn't transmitting to him, though they must be in range. 

Bucky tilted his head, his smile of greeting shrinking into something mischievous. Sam's chest constricted at the sight. "You should keep a better eye on your stuff."

"Guess that's what I get for closing my eyes when you told me to," Sam said, keeping his voice light. Bucky didn't know what else had come of Sam staying where Bucky left him, and they didn't need to get into it now.

Bucky just nodded, still smiling. "That is what you get. You wanna close your eyes a minute and let me see these? I hear they turn invisible." 

Bucky traced a finger down the strap on Sam's left shoulder. 

"Uh-uh," Sam said, curling his hands firmly over the straps. "They're brand new, I'm not letting anybody else play with them. I don't think Stark's going to make me another set if I let you run off with these."

"Sure he will," Bucky said, with casual certainty. "That's what he does. Keeps the team in fancy gear. And if I'm flyin' you'll need wings to keep up with me, right?"

Bucky, Sam was absolutely certain, wasn't talking about _Tony_ Stark. The team had to be the Howling Commandos. And Steve had almost certainly heard that.

Sam waited to see if Steve would say anything to Bucky, but Bucky stayed still, that little smile on his face, his fingers slipping under the edge of one shoulder strap.

"Bucky," Sam said hesitantly, and Bucky's gaze focused sharply on his, then down on the wings again.

"Stark," Bucky said in a different tone, his brows drawing together. 

"Tony made these," Sam said. "He's Howard's son. You knew Howard, didn't you?"

Bucky's frown deepened, and he looked away toward the darkness of the park.

"I know he made things. And I think," Bucky said slowly. "I think there was. A car."

Sam's stomach turned to ice, and he thought of Steve listening to Bucky's voice while standing on that rooftop next to Tony. 

"It was supposed to fly," Bucky said, looking up to meet Sam's eyes. Sam wished he knew any of the details of that fatal car accident and was also desperately glad he didn't. "I think the car was supposed to fly. It didn't, though, and Stark was--annoyed, maybe. Embarrassed." 

Bucky's voice was very small now, tentative, and that didn't sound anything like a faked car accident, even before Bucky said slowly, "I think I--I think I laughed."

Bucky went very still, suddenly, his head whipping around to look over his shoulder toward Midtown. Steve had definitely heard that, then. When Bucky looked back at Sam there was a wide-open expression Sam couldn't entirely decipher on his face. 

"He says that was the World's Fair," Bucky said, sounding slightly stunned. "1942. He says--we were there."

Bucky looked south again and shook his head sharply.

"I don't," he said, voice going flat, "I don't _remember_ \--" he reached for his ear, pulling the earpiece out sharply; for a second Sam expected him to fling it off the roof, but Bucky's fist closed around it. He stood there, frozen, still staring to the south, and then he shoved the earpiece into his own pocket.

"Hey," Sam said softly, keeping his own hands at his sides. He was very aware of the open space around him, the narrowness of the ledge he stood on. He had Bucky in front of him and a sheer drop behind.

Bucky's head whipped around, and a few seconds later Sam felt Bucky's focus settle on him.

"It's okay," Sam said. "It's okay if you don't remember all of that."

"It's okay with you," Bucky said tightly.

"Yeah," Sam said, and he did reach out, closing his hand in Bucky's t-shirt and giving a little tug. Bucky stepped in closer, just long enough after Sam pulled to let him know that Sam couldn't actually budge him by the strength of his hand. 

"Yeah, I'm saying it's okay with me," Sam said. "I'm the one here, I'm the one you're talking to, so all I can tell you is it's okay with me." 

_If you want to know what Steve thinks, you have to talk to Steve_. But Bucky obviously wasn't ready to talk to Steve, so Sam wasn't going to rub his nose in it. 

"It's okay," Sam repeated, tugging a little harder. Bucky's hands--both of them, without hesitation, came up to rest on Sam's sides.

Steadying him, Sam realized, before Bucky leaned in for a kiss. It was a careful kiss, soft and coaxing, and Sam went with it, giving Bucky a point of connection that didn't require any arguments.

Bucky tilted his face away after a moment, pressing his forehead to Sam's and breathing against his mouth. 

"Tell Steve..." he said quietly, and then his hands tightened on Sam's sides, and he shook his head slightly. "Tell Steve I said hi."

Bucky touched his mouth to Sam's again, the lightest of kisses, and then he took a careful step back, removing his hands from Sam and watching to be sure Sam's balance was steady before he stepped around Sam and jumped down to a lower part of the roof. Sam leaped into the sky again, climbing up enough to do a few spotter circles over the Arsenal, looking for a pattern of movement that might be Bucky. 

There was nothing, of course, but Sam banked out over the darkness of the park, circling slowly. 

_You'll need wings to keep up with me_ , Bucky had said. Not _to come after me_. Bucky thought of himself as part of a team with Steve and Sam--they'd suspected that, hoped for it, but never had Bucky's own word on it. That was good to have confirmed, but Sam realized, circling again on his smooth, perfect wings, that what was bothering him was that Bucky thought that that team extended to Tony Stark.

No. What was bothering him was that he wasn't at all sure Bucky was wrong, and he should have seen it before now. Tony had bitched about recreating the EXO-7 wings being insufficiently challenging, but he'd made them. It couldn't have been a trivial amount of work or resources. He'd made them for Sam at Steve's request, but the wings weren't a toy. Tony wouldn't have made them--Steve wouldn't have asked for them--only because Sam wanted to fly again.

He was on the team. Not just Steve's ad hoc Hydra-hunting team while they tried to reel Bucky in. He was--he might be--

He could be. But it would mean committing. There wasn't any end date to that enlistment. They'd let him keep his wings if he tapped out, but as long as he had the wings--hell, Sam admitted to himself, as long as Steve was out there throwing himself into the middle of trouble--Sam was never really going to be able to hang it up.

He wasn't going back to his real life. _This_ was his real life. Being on Steve's team, with Bucky, with Steve, all of this--this was it now. He couldn't give this up, and he didn't want to.

Sam banked toward Stark Tower, and Steve, and the life that had already been his for a while now. Fucking surreal wasn't the half of it.

* * *

Tony was alone on the roof when Sam touched down.

"You just missed him," Tony said, waving at the roof access door.

Sam shook his head, tugged off his goggles, and came over to take the pack off and do a post-flight check. He set the wing pack on the table, close enough for Tony to get his hands on it.

"He tell you what Bucky said?" Sam asked.

Tony nodded, a sharp, jerky motion that counterpointed strangely with his fingers moving quickly and gracefully over Sam's wings between them, touching a probe here and there, holograms springing up from the contact points.

"My dad knew more or less everything there was to know about Steve Rogers," Tony said. "I've read his files. He never knew Steve was at the World's Fair in '42 the night he showed the flying car and it failed on him."

"And if your dad didn't know," Sam elaborated, "then no one else knew. So the only way Bucky could've come up with that is if he's actually remembering being there."

"Got it in one," Tony said without looking up. "So that's interesting."

Sam nodded.

"Also Steve looked like someone shot his dog in front of him when Barnes cut him off," Tony added, making a sharp gesture that made the holograms disappear. "So you should probably go talk to him. This is fine, as I knew it would be."

"Thanks, man," Sam said, and Tony actually looked up and met his gaze. Sam didn't even know if he meant for the wings, or for taking whatever Steve had relayed him as seemingly-calmly as he was. He did know that he needed to ask a question that he didn't want to put on Steve tonight, and that Tony would give him a straight answer without making a big production out of it.

It was still hard as hell to get it out of his mouth, but Sam did it. "Hey, am I an Avenger now?"

Tony's eyes narrowed in a look that, after the last two days of debriefings, Sam knew meant Tony was choosing his words, not considering the substance of his answer.

"I think _am I an Avenger_ is one of those questions that if you have to ask, the answer is no," Tony said finally. "But I expect you to bring those wings and come running the next time the shit hits the fan, and you are definitely getting the mass text when that happens. After whatever that is, you won't have to ask anymore, provided you're still alive despite your ridiculous lack of armoring, so I'd say you're halfway there. Possibly sixty percent. You've got some moves." 

Sam nodded, and didn't suggest that maybe there wasn't going to be a next thing. There was always going to be a next thing. "Got it. Thanks." 

"Stop thanking me, it's tediously conventional and I have things to do," Tony said, abruptly in motion, heading to the penthouse's separate entrance. "You know your way back, right? If you get lost ask JARVIS."

Sam nodded to Tony's retreating back and packed the wings carefully back into their steel case, hoisting it up and following more slowly.

In the elevator on the way down Sam pulled out his phone and found that he had a couple of texts from Mel. _Are you moving to New York?_ and then, ten minutes later, _If you're moving to New York could you drag out this leave of absence thing another month? I need time to maneuver for a new officemate._

Sam stared down at the message, at his whole life back in DC and the real world. He felt the weight of the wings in their case; it still felt strange to be standing on his feet instead of soaring. He thought of Bucky on that rooftop and Steve, wherever he'd gone to ground.

 _I'll give you more notice than I give them_ , Sam promised, and pocketed his phone again.

Steve hadn't gone far; he was in the apartment Sam already found himself thinking of as theirs. Steve was leaning bodily against a window and looking out. The door stood open on a piece of furniture Sam had never paid much attention to--a liquor cabinet, he realized now. He went over and looked in, and found that it was stocked with Coke in glass bottles and a couple of jars of Ovaltine, plus a note: _If you actually want to get trashed that's experimental chemistry territory, talk to Banner._

Sam couldn't really fault Steve for the impulse. He wasn't even worried about it; if Steve had been able to get drunk as an occasional pressure-release it would make a nice break from his actual addiction to the adrenaline rush of reckless self-endangerment. Sam turned away from the open cabinet and went to stand by the window with Steve. This one looked south, out over the lights of Brooklyn and then the more scattered lights on the bay and the darkness of open water beyond.

"You wanna go jump off high things, I'm all set for catching you now," Sam offered.

Steve shook his head, refusing to be drawn. He said, very low, "I know I'm not supposed to talk to him."

Sam winced and scooted closer, putting his back to the glass so he could worm in halfway between Steve and the dark. Steve kept still and let him. 

"Hey. You knew something he should know. Letting him know he was remembering right, and _what_ he was remembering, that was good."

"But I shouldn't have pushed," Steve said, in the same resigned tone. "I shouldn't have--"

"Hey," Sam said, raising his hand to Steve's cheek and turning his head to make him look. Steve let himself be moved, meeting Sam's eyes steadily.

"Yeah, you pushed him a little bit," Sam said. "Yeah, it was too much for him to handle and he took off. But he kept his earpiece with him. He's not going to go far, and he's not going to stay gone long. And before he went, he told me to say hi to you for him."

It was physically painful to see Steve's expression brighten over something so small. "He...."

"Yeah, do you want the dramatic reenactment?" Sam said softly. "He said, _Tell Steve I said hi_ , and then--" 

Sam ducked in and brushed that last barely-there kiss across Steve's mouth.

Steve was looking not just happy but stunned when Sam pulled back. "Was that--did he mean that for me?"

Sam raised an eyebrow and shrugged. "He didn't say so specifically, but that was how it seemed to me. You think he wouldn't?"

Steve made a helpless gesture, raising and dropping both hands. "If he did it would be the first time. We never...."

It was Sam's turn to feel stunned. "You're not telling me--you said you guys--"

But he never had actually said what their relationship had been, not in so many words. Sam had just seen how entirely Steve was in love with the guy, put it together with the willingness to seize the damn day that Steve had demonstrated with _him_ for the last month, and filled in the rest. 

Steve shrugged stiffly. "We made do, we helped each other out a few times. We never let it be more than that. I--it felt like more than that to me, and I thought it did to him, too. I was sure. Almost sure. We didn't talk about it, so even if he remembered I don't know.... It wasn't like it is now. It wasn't something I would've wished on Bucky. To try to be together like that, it would've made our lives--" Steve shook his head. 

"All this time," Sam said, and he could feel his own damn heart breaking for both of them, for everything he hadn't realized Steve had to be jealous of. "And you never kissed him."

Steve shook his head, looking away again. "If it's only--if he only wants you, that's. That's all right. If that was just for you, I'm not going to...."

For once Steve couldn't make himself say whatever perfectly noble thing he no doubt sincerely meant to say, and Sam couldn't say _of course he loves you like that_ any more than he could tell Bucky _of course you're enough for him just the way you are_. 

On the other hand, this meant the guy Sam had known he was runner-up to was somebody Steve had never really gotten to be with at all. Sam was the one Steve got. That had to count for something. Knowing Steve, it probably counted for a hell of a lot.

"Steve," Sam said, because it was all he could say, "this is for you, okay? This right here, this is--" and he drew Steve down, hands on either side of his face, for a kiss that wouldn't leave any room for doubt. 

Steve hesitated just long enough for Sam to notice him doing it, and then he grabbed hold of Sam's shirt in both hands and kissed back. The second time Sam licked into his mouth Steve groaned and moved, swinging around so that he had his back to the window. He pulled Sam with him, keeping him close. 

Sam could take a hint when Steve shouted it, so he leaned his weight into Steve, pinning him there against the glass and the sky. He kissed Steve like he wasn't ever going to do anything else, like he was going to devour him. _I want you even if he doesn't, I need you, I won't let you go._

Steve's breathing went ragged almost from the first, in a way that had nothing to do with his lung capacity. It took a minute past that--a handful of quick, broken kisses--before Sam heard how it sounded and realized that no one else needed to hear this. This was private.

"Hey," Sam said, taking one hand off of Steve, which made Steve's arms tighten hard around him. "No, we're good, just take your earpiece out. We're going off comms for a little while."

Steve's eyes opened at that, and he looked surprised and then torn.

Sam shook his head. "He's fine. He knows where to find us if he needs us. This is you and me, nobody else."

Steve exhaled and his hand came up to the back of Sam's neck, pulling him into another kiss, this one long and deep and dizzying enough that Sam almost forgot why by the time Steve stopped. He remembered when Steve reached for his ear, and Sam reached up and did the same, pocketing his earpiece while Steve removed his. Sam pushed the next kiss, grinding against Steve and using just enough strength to make a point--not _I could hold you here_ but _I could catch you_.

Steve moaned into Sam's mouth, tongue moving quick against Sam's. When he pressed himself up against Sam he wasn't trying to break Sam's hold at all.

"Please," Steve gasped, his hands sliding under Sam's t-shirt, fingers splaying wide across Sam's skin like he just needed to touch as much as he could. "I--please, Sam--"

"I got you," Sam murmured, getting one hand on the nape of Steve's neck and the other up under his shirt at the small of his back. Steve was prone to touch the way he wants to be touched, like he couldn't ask except by example. 

Steve relaxed a little, letting himself sag into Sam's grip, though his kisses stayed quick and hungry and breathless.

"Yeah, we got this," Sam murmured. After a few more kisses, when the way they were rocking against each other had fallen into an undeniable rhythm and Sam was hard enough for his jeans to be a nuisance edging toward painful, he added, "You wanna go somewhere that's not up against a glass wall?"

Unlike earlier, it was dark enough now outside--and they had enough lights on inside--that anybody who was looking this direction actually would see something.

Steve shook his head almost frantically. "Please, just--here's good."

Tension flashed through Steve's body, his fingertips digging into Sam's skin, and that was enough to remind Sam that Steve had been fighting an almost certainly losing battle against secondhand claustrophobia all day. He needed to stay the hell out of that basement for as long as he could, and other than the rooftop this was as far from it as Steve could get, with just a sheet of glass between him and sky.

"Okay, got it," Sam said. He eased his hand down from Steve's neck to tug at the back of his shirt. If they were doing this here, it was time to get on with it. 

Steve loosened his grip on Sam enough for Sam to get his shirt off him. Steve pulled Sam's shirt off in turn and didn't stop to kiss again after that, just went straight for Sam's fly. Sam let him; supersoldier speed and dexterity were kind of fascinating to observe. He had never slept with anyone who was this decidedly un-clumsy getting undressed for sex.

 _I am spoiled for regular humans_ , he thought, and for once he could think it without dread, because Steve was it for him--Steve and Bucky, but both of them, for the long haul, not giving anything up, not letting go. Sam felt himself smiling as he stepped back to let Steve finish undressing himself, and Steve caught sight of it; he stopped with his open jeans hanging precariously off his ass to grab Sam with both hands and kiss him again.

Sam saw the little surprised smile on his face before their mouths met, and he felt a different kind of heat in his chest, knowing he'd given that to Steve. He went with the kiss for long enough to show willing, and then he laughed a little and shoved Steve back. "Come on, man, finish the job you started. Clothes off."

"Aviators and their checklists," Steve huffed, grinning, but he got back to undressing, bending to get his boots off while Sam took a prudent step to one side and did the same.

"That's how we're able to come find lost infantry, man," Sam said. "You gotta do things in order, can't be running off into the woods any old way."

"You say that, but it always works out," Steve said, leaning back against the glass as he let his pants drop. "One way or another."

Sam kicked his jeans away and stopped for a moment, admiring the sight of Steve against the glass. Steve, seeing him looking, tilted his head back and thrust his hips out a little, like Sam needed any particular help focusing on his dick. 

"Lights out," Sam said, turning his head a little, and the apartment went dark around them, leaving Steve silhouetted by the glow of the city. Sam stepped in, wrapping his hand around Steve's cock and pressing up against him everywhere. 

"Just don't get out too far ahead of your backup," Sam said softly. "All I ask, man."

"Mm," Steve said, rocking his hips as he slid his hands down to Sam's ass, tugging him in as tight as he could with Sam's hand between them. "Nah, feels like you're right behind me."

Sam snorted and kissed Steve so he couldn't make stupid jokes for a while. Sam braced both hands on the glass and rubbed up against him, feeling the hardness of Steve's cock against his belly and thrusting back the same way.

What Steve had said finally connected up in his head with the reason they were doing this here. Sam shuddered a little, breaking his rhythm to pull back and say, "Hey, Steve, turn around for me."

"Turn," Steve said, sounding a little dazed. 

Sam grinned and stepped back, using his hands to move him. Steve got it after a second and let himself be turned to face the glass.

"Oh," he said, sounding even more dazed, as Sam crowded up behind him, his dick pressed into the cleft of Steve's ass. He got one hand on Steve's dick and the other wrapped around his chest, holding on tight while Steve leaned into the glass, suspended against the sky. He spread his hands wide, trusting himself to Sam's hold. 

"I got you," Sam said, hitching his hips against Steve and stroking him in the same rhythm. "I'm not gonna let you go. I'm not gonna lose you."

Steve made a little wrecked sound, jerking back and forth between Sam's hand and Sam's dick. Sam wanted more than almost anything to be fucking him right now, but he wasn't going to get supplies and he _really_ wasn't going another round of the _it's okay you won't hurt me I'll heal_ argument. Sam started sliding his left hand lower, instead, down Steve's side to his hip, down to his thigh. Steve pressed himself harder against the glass without Sam's arm in between, arching so that his ass pressed back against Sam, and Sam muffled a groan against Steve's shoulder, thrusting irresistibly against him for a few breaths before he remembered what he was doing. 

Sam slid his hand down between Steve's legs, and Steve went suddenly still. Sam grinned and kissed the back of his neck, rocking his hips to work his dick against Steve's ass and leaning his weight a little more heavily against Steve as his hand curled around Steve's balls. "I got you."

"Yeah you do," Steve said, sounding a little strained, and this time when Sam rocked into him Steve moved too, shoving his dick into Sam's hand while Sam angled his wrist just so; he felt Steve's balls tightening against the palm of his hand, pressed behind them and was rewarded with Steve losing his breath in a moan.

"Yeah, I do," Sam agreed, pressing up against Steve's prostate while stroking his cock steadily, going up on his toes to lean in harder against his back. Steve pushed back, just enough to feel Sam's weight, not enough to interrupt anything Sam was doing with his hands. 

Sam kissed along the side of Steve's throat, feeling the pounding of his heart and the racing of his breath, the sweat breaking out everywhere they touched. He had all of Steve in his grasp now, and it felt good in a way that went straight through him, sharper than just the friction against his dick.

Steve bucked a little again and Sam knew from every inch of his body that he was getting close, but also from that small movement. Steve never could keep still at the end. He managed not to throw Sam off, and Sam rewarded him with a quicker stroke, a little more pressure. Steve's hands moved, finally, one bracing above his head while he reached back with the other, hooking his arm over Sam's shoulder, his fingers digging in just above Sam's shoulder blade. 

"Please," Steve gasped. "Please, Sam, please, please--"

"You know I got you," Sam murmured, giving him a kiss with teeth in it right at the base of his throat, and Steve went silent and his body bowed under Sam's as he came in hot pulses over Sam's fingers.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut, keeping still and trying not to come himself. He could feel Steve's orgasm in every muscle of his body as well as his jerking dick and his balls. He made himself wait through it before he moved again. 

"Please," Steve said again, when Sam gave an experimental thrust against his ass. "Lemme--Sam, please--"

"Yeah, come here," Sam said, taking his hands away and pushing back just an inch. It was enough for Steve to squirm around between him and the glass, turning to face Sam. He draped his arms around Sam, one over his shoulders, one hand spread on the cheek of his ass, and he leaned back limply against the glass while Sam held on to him with a hand on the nape of his neck and the other at the small of his back. Sam kissed Steve's soft, hot mouth while he rutted against him. Steve's fingers dug in again when Sam came, an edge of almost-pain to spike the pleasure just right.

They stayed there for a while, leaning against the window, kissing slowly, until there was the telltale squeak of skin shifting against glass under pressure.

Sam and Steve both laughed a little, almost silently. They moved together without having to discuss it, Steve stretching out first on the carpeting, next to the glass that went all the way down to the floor. Sam spared only a second to stare at the collection of streaks and marks Steve had left on the glass while Sam held him there--anybody could read the story pretty clearly from those--and then he stretched himself out over Steve, blanketing him and holding him down. 

They kissed a little and then just lay together, breath and heart rates slowing down, until Steve's finger traced the curve of Sam's ear and then tapped at the center, where his earpiece wasn't.

"Yeah?" Sam said, turning his head to look where his jeans had fallen. Steve reached over and snagged them, tugging them within Sam's easy reach.

"Yeah," Steve said. "If he wants you--I want you to hear him."

"I can do that," Sam said, fishing out the little piece of plastic and popping it in. He stayed where he was, though, rising and falling a little with every breath Steve took.

* * *

Sam woke up to the sound of Steve's breathing turning from labored to frantic. He was alone in bed, but the lights that came up automatically if either of them got up were glowing pale gold along the base of the dark windows. It was enough light to show him Steve huddled beside the bed, forehead pressed to his knees, arms wrapped around his legs.

"Steve?" 

Steve didn't show any sign that he heard. If Steve were already awake and didn't want to be in bed with Sam while he came down from the nightmare, he'd be in the bathroom or out in the living room or up on the roof. Steve was still asleep; this was the nightmare, and it was the grinding endless kind that Steve wouldn't startle himself awake from.

Steve was panting now, tiny whines escaping him now and then. Sam rolled off the other side of the bed and came around to Steve the long way, slouching against the bed so he wasn't looming above Steve. 

"Hey," he said softly. "Steve, hey, come on. Wake up. Steve, it's okay."

Sam wasn't going to touch him. Steve had shoved him away the first time Sam tried that. Sam hadn't been hurt, but Steve had been even more freaked out by the possibility of hurting him than he had been by the nightmare. No need to repeat that experiment tonight.

"Steve," Sam said again, "Come on, Steve, I'm right here, come on back."

"Sam?" Bucky said in his ear, and Sam's whole body jolted with surprise. He'd kept his earpiece in overnight out of habit. He usually did, because Steve had nightmares often enough that he always slept with his out. Sam's sleep disturbances tended more toward insomnia, and even when he did have nightmares it wasn't Bucky's name he was in danger of yelling out.

Bucky's icon had been green all night, but Sam had figured he'd be keeping the earpiece in his pocket for longer than six hours.

"Yeah," Sam said when he got past being startled and remembered to answer. "I'm here."

"Steve's having a nightmare?" Bucky sounded worried. Not out of proportion, but he was definitely concerned.

"Yeah," Sam said. "Pretty bad one. I can't wake him up."

"I can," Bucky said, at the same time Sam's phone started ringing.

Sam raced around the bed to grab it and then stopped, holding the phone in his hand. He _wanted_ the ringing to wake Steve; he wanted _anything_ to wake Steve.

Steve made a noise like an actual sob. Sam hit the green button and pulled his earpiece out to avoid the echo effects of hearing Bucky twice. 

"Put me on speaker, I can wake him up," Bucky said.

"Bucky..." Sam said, but there were pretty much no circumstances in which Sam was going to prevent Bucky from talking to Steve. It couldn't hurt to let him try. Sam walked back around the bed, sat down cross-legged and just out of arm's reach from Steve, and set the phone down between them before he hit the button. "You're on."

"Steve, come on, get up," Bucky said, and ice ran down Sam's spine. That wasn't the Bucky he'd just been talking to. That was the Bucky in the old videos; that was the Bucky who hadn't been recorded before he was wiped and couldn't be programmed back in. 

Steve twitched, and his breath caught, but he didn't move.

"Get _up_ , Stevie, we're gonna be late, come on, shake a leg--"

Steve jerked awake all at once with an honest to God grin on his face as he uncurled toward the sound of Bucky's voice. Then he saw Sam, and dropped his gaze to the phone, and the smile congealed into a grimace of pain.

Bucky was still talking. "You're gonna make us late, punk, come on--"

"Bucky," Steve said hoarsely. "Stop that."

Bucky went sharply silent.

Steve closed his eyes. He spread one hand over his face, and Sam watched him take a few deep, shuddering breaths. Then he dropped his hand, and his face was something like composed as he pulled the phone a few inches closer. 

"Thank you for waking me up," he said distinctly. "But you don't--Buck, you don't have to pretend for me, not ever. I just--" Steve cut off sharply, ducking his head, and when he spoke again it came out small. "All I need is to hear your voice, that's enough."

Bucky didn't say anything, and Sam was tempted to put his earpiece back in and see if it was picking up Bucky's breathing.

Steve broke the silence, leaning against the bed and looking at Sam across the phone as he did. "I know you don't remember everything, Bucky. You don't have to. I don't care what you talk about, I just--I want to be your friend. I want us to be friends now, not just before. I want you to talk to me. You don't have to if you don't want to, but that's all I want."

After a couple of seconds Bucky cleared his throat and said, "I used to read to you, didn't I? You were sick and I read to you."

Steve squeezed his eyes shut. His eyelashes were wet. Sam couldn't help reaching out to him, and without opening his eyes Steve unerringly grabbed hold of his hand. 

"Yeah," Steve said. Sam could see the tendons standing out in his wrist with the strength of his grip on Sam's hand--he'd angled his grip not to grind bones together, so it didn't really hurt--but his voice sounded totally calm. "You did. Lots of times. I was sick a lot."

"Sometimes I couldn't even show you the pictures," Bucky said slowly. "I just had to tell you about them."

"You were good at it," Steve said. He opened his hand slightly, letting up the pressure, but Sam knew it was a deliberate effort, not relaxation. "I could always see it in my head just like I was looking at the page."

"This one's not very action-packed," Bucky said, sounding dubious. "But that's okay, it'll put you right to sleep."

"Yeah, that sounds perfect," Steve said. Sam tugged on their joined hands and Steve opened his eyes. Sam lay down on the floor and Steve followed suit; Sam knew there was no point trying to get Steve back into a bed tonight, but this way at least he might rest. They curled around the phone like closed parentheses with their joined hands resting beside it.

"Okay," Bucky said, and cleared his throat again. "I'll just--okay. _Each surface plate of the forearm segment is controlled by three servo motors (labeled a, b, and c in Figure 6)_ \--and then there's Figure 6, which is just a line drawing of the middle of my arm...."

Bucky went on and on, describing in meticulous detail the diagrams Steve had hurried past that afternoon. Sam rubbed his thumb against the back of Steve's hand and watched the faint light glint on tears as they slid down Steve's cheek. Steve's face was tensed, his mouth twisted up. He looked like he was bracing himself against pain, but his whole body tilted longingly toward the sound of Bucky's voice, and he never let go of Sam's hand.

* * *

Bucky cleared his throat and studied the next full-page diagram, deciding which part to describe first. Before he'd decided, Sam's voice came from the phone propped against his metal shoulder. "Hey, Bucky, you can stop. Steve's asleep. I'm gonna hang up, okay?"

"Okay," Bucky said obediently. He felt suddenly, sharply alone when the phone's screen went dark.

The sensation lasted about a second and a half, and then Sam's voice was in his ear instead. "Thanks for that, man. That was good."

Bucky swallowed. His throat was sore--he'd been reading for nearly an hour--but that was nothing. Not when Steve had said _I want us to be friends_ , the same day that Sam had said _I want you to be you_. It didn't feel real, but the words kept echoing around inside him; he played them over and over in his mind, rehearsing them. They were memories he didn't want to lose.

Steve hadn't said it the same way Sam had, and Bucky thought that meant Sam hadn't told Steve about what Bucky had said. That meant Sam hadn't prompted Steve to say those things. Steve had said them all on his own, just for Bucky. Steve didn't lie. He'd meant that. _I want you to talk to me. That's enough._

"I like reading to Steve," Bucky assured Sam. He had a picture of that in his head that wasn't just a picture; it was a warm feeling in his chest that matched the way he'd felt for the last hour, knowing he was helping Steve rest, making him happy. Bucky always wanted to do those things any way he could.

"Well, he definitely likes listening," Sam said. Bucky thought maybe the warmth in his voice was as much for Bucky as it was for Steve. "Look, I know you're probably all settled in wherever you're spending the night if you were okay sitting and reading for an hour, but I gotta say--if you want to come in, there's lots of space. Lots of windows, we're up nice and high, so no one's looking in at us and we can see everything around. If you wanted to come under cover for the night, just say the word, I'll get you in."

Bucky looked up. The roof over his head, concrete studded with the elevator's machinery, was just above his arm's reach. The elevator shaft fell away for ninety-three floors below the ledge he was perched on, but he had his metal arm locked to hold him in place, and his feet propped across the corner. He could sleep here and wouldn't fall. Nothing could get at him here without him seeing it coming, and if Steve and Sam really needed him, he only had to drop four floors and force the doors. He'd set off all the alarms in the place, which would be annoying after all his care getting this far, but he could get to them in under a minute. He would if he had to, but he didn't have to now.

"No," Bucky said. "I'm all right where I am."

"Okay, man, whatever works for you," Sam said, and now the warmth in his voice was all for Bucky. 

He felt himself smiling and didn't bother to make himself stop. Sam had said--and Steve had said--and he'd taken care of himself and taken care of _Steve_. Sam was pleased with him and Steve wanted to be his friend--Steve still called him Bucky--even if he didn't remember how to be Bucky all the way. 

"Sleep tight," Sam said, yawning a little.

"Don't let the bedbugs bite," Bucky replied automatically. 

Sam gave a little chuffing laugh and then let out a long breath. Bucky pictured him cuddling up to Steve, and the smile on his face widened. They would take care of each other, and Bucky would keep watch, doing his part to take care of them all.

He turned his attention back to the tablet displaying the files, squinting at the diagram again. It felt strange for his mouth to be still after so much talking. After a few seconds of working his jaw on nothing he reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out his mouthguard. He sniffed it again--the rubber had a faintly sweet, familiar smell--and then he put it between his teeth on one side, chewing absently as he studied.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Seek Out the Hidden Places](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5047183) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




End file.
